Social Institutions

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SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

PRENTICE-HALL SOCIOLOGY SERIES
edited by Herbert Blumer

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

In An Era of NVorld Upheaval

by
HARRY ELMER BARNES

New York

PRENTICE-HALL, INC.
1942

COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY
PRENTICE-HALL, INC.

70 Fifth Avenue, New York

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRO-
DUCED IN ANY FORM, BY MIMEOGRAPH OR ANY OTHER MEANS,
WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITINfi PROM THR PTIHLTSHRRS.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
FRANK HAMILTON HANKINS

Preface

THIS book attempts to describe and appraise our institutional equip-
ment in a period of far-reaching and unpredictable social change. We
are now in the midst of a great world-revolution, comparable only to
the dawn of history, the breakup of ancient pagan civilization in the
later Roman Empire, and the disintegration of medieval culture in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ours is an even more critical period
of cultural transformation because the tempo is far swifter than in any
earlier era of change and because the problems of control and adjustment
involved are infinitely more complex than they were in simpler agrarian
and provincial epochs.

The chief reason why we find ourselves encompassed by world-shaking
changes is that our material culture — our science and technology — has
moved ahead much more rapidly than the social institutions through
which we seek to control and utilize our mechanical facilities. In an era
of • dynamos, transoceanic clippers, radios, television, and automatic
machines we still rely on institutions which had reached maturity in
the days of Abraham Lincoln — many of them at the time of George
Washington. The social thinking and institutions of the stagecoach era
have signally failed to sustain a society which boasts stratosphere air-
liners.

Classical culture fell because Greek and Roman ideas and institutions
— Utopian philosophy and imperial politics — got ahead of the limited
technology, especially in the realm of transportation. Our culture, on
the other hand, is gravely threatened because our machines have moved
far beyond our social thinking and institutional patterns. We shall
never enjoy any assurance of personal security or international peace
until our institutions catch up with our unprecedentedly rich and diver-
sified material culture.

Since the backward state of our institutional heritage is the outstand-
ing cause of the present sorry state of the civilized world, no realistic
writer can very well be expected to present a eulogistic or optimistic
appraisal of social institutions in our day. He may well pay .tribute to
any actual virtues in our institutional setup, but he should also be
frank and candid in revealing the obvious anachronisms and defects*
There is no possibility of achieving essential institutional reforms until
we have come to recognize the need for such improvement. The, realistic
assessment of our institutions set forth in the pages of this book is not
offered in a mood of carping criticism but as the indispensable forerum^r
of changes that must be made if we are to retain our freedom and bring

viii PREFACE

about security and peace for the mass of mankind. We cannot logically
expect people to support reform unless they are made aware that reform
is necessary.

The real friends of our American way of life are those who recognize
and fearlessly reveal the obvious danger signals that are evident on
every side, and who seek to eliminate the threats to our social order
while there is yet time and opportunity. The most dangerous enemies
we have are not the "crackpots" who peddle cheap and naive panaceas.
Such persons at least recognize that something is wrong, though their
remedy may be as bad or worse than the malady itself. The real menace
to our civilization is to be found in those who insist on living in a "fools'
paradise" of smug conceit and complacency, conducting a sort of "sit-
down strike" against intelligence, and insisting that nothing is wrong
in this best of all possible worlds. Such adamant smugness inevitably
charts the course of society from decadence, through dry rot, to crisis
and totalitarianism.

Never was candor more needed than in a period of war and readjust-
ment. Our leaders have proclaimed that they hate war and despise
it as a system of international policy, even if we currently have to
fight to assure a less unstable and less warlike world in the future. To
eulogize war, in itself, as a noble human experience is to lock arms
ideologically with Hitler and the Black Dragon minions of the Mikado,
and to concede by implication that they are right in their bellicose
philosophy. The exigencies of wartime doubtless require a rigor in
social control exceeding that which will suffice for peaceful days. But
we should make sure that emergency measures are limited to the emer-
gency and are not greater than the emergency requires. There is little
to be gained in carrying the Four Freedoms to the Antipodes if we
surrender them indefinitely in our own country. Never will informed
intelligence be more essential than in the difficult period of post-war
readjustment. It will be a poor preparation for that critical era if we
are forced to "park" our mentalities for the duration. Cerebration is
not something which can be put in mothballs and withdrawn at will.

Since it is quite impossible to understand the nature and current
problems of any social institution without a full knowledge of its evolu-
tion in the past, much attention is given to the history of each of the
institutions discussed in this book. It is hoped that this historical back-
ground will not only clarify understanding but will also promote greater
tolerance and more constructive thinking. 5ft)thing else is so conducive to
urbanity and open-mindedness as historical studies, and no other subject
so completely demands these qualities and attitudes as does the study
of social institutions. It can safely be said that no other book of its
kind in any language provides so ample an historical background for
the appraisal of our institutional problems and readjustments.

This book, like all scientific historical and sociological works, is com-
mitted to the thesis of cultural determinism. Yet it does not go to the
Billy extreme of ignoring personal agents in the social process. Capi-

PREFACE ix

talism, for example, does not operate in a void without personal
capitalists, nor does party government function without politicians. But
our criticisms and condemnations, if any, are directed against institutions
rather than the individuals who merely reflect and execute these insti-
tutional trends. However blameworthy a speculating utility magnate,
a corrupt politician, a racketeer, or a venal propagandist may be, he is
a creature of his time and folkways. It will do little good to denounce
or punish him unless we also proceed to alter the institutional patterns
which produce such types.

At th^ outset we seek to make clear how institutions arise from the
need for group discipline, which enables man to exploit the all-essential
advantages of cooperative effort. We show how the efficiency of insti-
tutions is directly related to their ability to serve the needs of a
particular type of culture at any given time. When they get out of
adjustment with the material basis of life, they decline in efficiency and
often prove an obstruction to social well-being. Such is the situation
in our day, when cultural lag, or the gulf between our musty and decadent
institutions and our dynamic technology, is the outstanding cause of our
social problems and perplexities.

Next, we turn to the leading economic institutions of our time —
industry, capitalism, and property. The contributions which these have
made to human progress and prosperity are fully recognized, while their
current deficiencies are frankly indicated, in the hope that the reforms
required may be made before the system collapses and collectivism inter-
venes to apply drastic measures of rehabilitation. Society cannot well
tolerate indefinitely the spectacle of mass starvation and deprivation
in the midst of potential plenty.

Our treatment of political institutions revolves about the crisis in
democracy and liberty in our time. The present framework of our
democratic government is supplied by the national state and constitu-
tional government. The national state has grown overburdened and
top-heavy as a result of the increasing variety and complexity of the
problems with which government has to deal, and it maintains a potent
bellicosity which holds over mankind a perpetual threat of war. Con-
stitutions, instead of being regarded as the means to the end of orderly
and efficient government, all too frequently become ends in themselves.
This situation creates an air of awe and reverence which handicaps all
efforts to adjust our governmental machinery to the changing needs of
a dynamic society.

Political parties provide the technique of representative government
and democracy, but they have a proclivity to develop corrupt and un-
democratic trends and to foster inefficiency in governmental action.
Party government is remarkably proficient in producing politicians,
namely, men who are experts in getting elected and preparing to get
reflected. But it is lamentably inefficient and defective in -providing
us with statesmen, namely, officials who know what to do after they
are elected.

x PREFACE

Our traditional democracy was formulated and introduced in a simple,
agrarian culture, with few political problems and in an era when little
scientific knowledge was available about man and society. It was
inevitable that such a system of government would be unsuited to exer-
cise political control over an urban, industrial world-civilization. Unless
this fact is speedily recognized and the older democracy is revamped in
harmony with the social realities of our day and in accord with the
teachings of social science, there is little prospect that democratic govern-
ment can be sustained. The true friends of democracy, then, are those
who recognize this challenging fact and seek to reconstruct democratic
government while there is an opportunity to do so. Those who stub-
bornly defend archaic policies and practices are the best friends of the
totalitarianism which eagerly waits "just around the corner." Huey
Long may well have had a brilliant "hunch" when he suggested that
Fascism is likely to come to America in the name of democracy. Most
of the really dangerous proto-Fascist organizations in our country flaunt
the word "democracy" or "freedom" in their official titles.

Since liberty is one of our main advantages and prizes, as over against
the totalitarian way of life, it is especially important that we pay
attention to the current crisis in liberty. Our civil liberties were won
and catalogued back in the seventeenth century, and we have done
lamentably little to extend and buttress them since that era. The
middle class or bourgeoisie which fought for them and triumphed is
now being challenged, and its long ascendency over society is passing
away. Bureaucracy, begotten of the need for ever greater governmental
intervention, is not too solicitous of liberty. Crisis government can
rarely be a libertarian government. Never was it more true that we
need to exercise that "eternal vigilance" which is the price of an assured
liberty.

In our chapters on law we condense and summarize the indictment of
our current legal ideas and practices which have been put forward in
recent years by progressive lawyers. It is high time that such reforms
be executed as will render unsupportable the frequent quip that law has
no relation to justice or that lawyers make more litigation than they
settle. Denial of justice invites revolt, and there is little "rule of
law" in revolutionary or totalitarian regimes. Legal reforms are as
much a matter of self-interest on the part of the legal profession as
they are a concern of society at large.

Nothing is more novel in our age thanlfee amazing agencies for the
communication of information and the many devices for the molding
of public opinion. Though propaganda is as old as histo'ry — probably
older than a written language — the techniques now employed in propa-
ganda are far different from what they were in an era before the daily
newspaper, the radio, and the moving pictures. In a democratic society
we are especially dependent upon accurate mass information. Misin-
formation and deliberate distortion by our agencies of communication
imperil free government and liberal institutions. The main safeguard

PREFACE xi

of a liberal democracy is full public knowledge of the devices and
methods of propaganda, so that the citizenry may be both informed and
forewarned. Censorship is the first step on the road to totalitarian
suppression of ideas. We must be on our guard against unnecessary
invasions of liberty and the denial of freedom of expression. Censorship
is the indispensable tool of the dictator.

In the section on the family and community we describe those changes
in society and culture which have undermined the old rural family life
and its associated practices and have disrupted most other primary
institutions. Suggestions are offered as to how the family might be
firmly reconstructed in accord with our new modes of living arid could
be made to serve our age as well as the traditional rural family of yore
met the needs of a simpler life. New forms of community organization
are slowly arising to take over the tasks formerly executed by leading
primary groups such as the neighborhood, the play group, and the like.

Finally, we treat those institutions which promote richer living among
men. The origins of religion are surveyed, its antiquities revealed, and
its potential services to contemporary society clearly indicated. Educa-
tion is presented as the chief hope that we have of guiding society along
the path of progress through planned and orderly change rather than by
revolution and violence. But education cannot perform this indis-
pensable service unless it recognizes its responsibilities and adopts the
attitudes and techniques which these responsibilities logically impose.
Quietism and timidity in education only lay the ground for the agitator
and the revolutionist. More complete and more realistic instruction
in the social sciences is obligatory, if education is to aid in preserving
the democratic way of life.

Our machines have provided us with a potential age of security and
leisure. Either we shall realize this "dream of the ages" through sub-
duing machines to human service or they will tear our culture asunder
and there will be neither leisure nor abundance. If civilization survives,
the main task of the future will be the conquest of leisure, thus supplant-
ing the chief problem of the past, which has been the procurement of
subsistence through long hours of toil. Recreation and art may provide
us with two of the most hopeful modes of leisure-time expression, but
we are as yet only on the borderline of an adequate development of
either of them as a phase of the daily life of man.

We stand at one of the great turning points in the history of human
civilization. Whether we will move ahead to security, peace, and a
life worthy of human beings or will revert to barbarism through con-
tinued misuse of our unique opportunities and facilities, depends upon
our ability to modernize our institutional patterns. If this book helps
in some slight degree in promoting institutional reconstruction it will
have served its purpose.

HARRY ELMER BARNES

Cooperstown, N. Y.
July 21, 1942

Table of Contents

PABT I

THE FOUNDATION AND FRAMEWORK OF
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

PAGES

I. T^HEj^ ............. 3

» The Need and Purpose of Social Organization ............. 3

• The Historical Development of the Forms of Social Organization 5

• Types of Social Bonds ................................... 7

The Leading Forms of Social Groups ....................... 10

Primary Groups and the "We" Group .................... 13

Society, Community, and Associations ..................... 15

The Value and Contributions of Social Organization ....... 16

The Modes of Group Activity and Social Control ......... 18

Society and the Social Organism ........................... 19

II. A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS ................... 22

Basic Human Drives .................................... 22

The Human Needs That Arise from the Basic Drives ....... 23

Some Outstanding Human Activities and Interests That Grow

Out of Basic Human Needs ........................... 24

*—• Social Institutions: the Machinery through Which Society

Carries On Its Activities ............................... 29

.Primary and Secondary Institutions ....................... 31

Institutions and Social Efficiency .......................... 35

Evolution of Social Institutions ........................ 38

III. CULTURAL LAG AND THE CRISIS IN INSTITUTIONAL LIFE ... 48

The Transitional Character of Our Era .................... 48

How the Gulf between Machines and Institutions Came About 52
Some Social and Cultural Implications of the Gulf between

Machines and Institutions ............................. 55

The Institutional Lag in Contemporary Culture ............. 58

Are We Living in a Scientific Age? ......................... 63

xiii

xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART II
ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS IN AN ERA OF WORLD CRISIS

CHAPTER PAGE

IV. SOME PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 66

Some Suggested Stages of Industrial Evolution 66

Outstanding Aspects of the Evolution of Agriculture 69

Outstanding Trends in the Evolution of Manufacturing .... 85

Leading Periods in the Development of Trade and Commerce 98

Leading Forms of Control Over Industry 103

The Motives of Industrial Effort Ill

V. CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 113

*The Fundamental Nature of Economic Problems 113

The Historical Background and Rise of Capitalism 115

The Ascendency of Finance Capitalism 125

Some Defects in the System of Finance Capitalism 127

Industrial Capitalism, Industrial Waste, and Inadequate Mass

Purchasing Power : . . 137

Is Capitalism Worth Saving? 146

Some Problems of Capital and Labor 149

The Problem of Industrial Unemployment 153

Old Age as an Industrial and Social Problem 156

The Outlook for Capitalism in the United States 158

VI. THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY IN THE LIGHT OF SOCIOLOGY

AND HISTORY 160

Basic Definitions and Concepts 160

Some Psychological Foundations of Property 164

Property Drives in the Light of Psychology, Ethnology, and

Sociology 165

Some Outstanding Phases of the History of Property 168

The Inheritance of Property 185

The Social Justification of Property and Property Rights .... 189

Some Outstanding Abuses of Property 195

Some Major Inroads on Private Property Today 197

The Future of Private Property 198

PART III

POLITICAL AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS IN TRANSITION
VII. THE FRAMEWORK OF DEMOCRACY: THE NATIONAL STATE

AND CONTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT 200

An Outline of the History of Nationalism 200

Nationalism, State Activity, and the Growing Complexity of

Political Problems 217

TABLE OF CONTENTS xv

CHAPTER PAGE
VII. THE FRAMEWORK OF DEMOCRACY: THE NATIONAL STATE
AND CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT (Cont.) :

/'Nationalism, Patriotism, and War Psychology 219

The Rise of Constitutional Government and the Ascendency of

Republics 221

VIII. THE TECHNIQUE OF DEMOCRACY: POLITICAL PARTIES AND

PARTY GOVERNMENT 229

The Role of Political Parties in Modern Government 229

The Rise of Party Government 232

Outstanding Problems of Party Government 239

Corruption and Extravagance Under Party Government .... 248

Reform Measures and Their Fate 259

IX. THE CRISIS IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE CHALLENGE

TO LIBERTY 268

A Brief History of Democracy 268

Some Major Assumptions of Democracy in the Light of Their

Historical Background 274

Democracy Put to the Test 278

Democracy and the Political Future 287

The Struggle for Civil Liberties 290

X. WAR As A SOCIAL INSTITUTION 309

How War Complicates Social Problems 309

Outstanding Phases of the Evolution of Warfare f . . 310

The Underlying Causes of War in Contemporary Society .... 326

The Impact of War on Society and Culture 339

Prelude to the Second World War 345

The Social Revolution Behind the Second World War 348

XI. LAW AND JUSTICE As A SOCIAL PROBLEM 353

Our Lawyer-made Civilization 353

Leading Stages in the Evolution of Law 355

Modern Theories and Schools of Law 370

Current Criticisms of Our Legal Institutions and Practices .... 372

Defects in the Current System of Law 377

Problems Arising Out of Law-making 381

XII. LAW IN ACTION AND PROBLEMS OF LEGAL PROCEDURE 392

Law in the Courtroom 392

Natural Law, Constitutional Law, and the Protection of Property 406

Corporation Law and Commercialized Legal Practice 417

Activities and Methods of Rank-and-File Lawyers 425

Some Outstanding Defects in the Criminal Law 432

The Travesty of the Jury Trial 437

Suggested Reforms in Legal Practice and Courtroom Procedure 442

xviii TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
XIX. LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS (Cont.) :

Landmarks in the Development of Art ..................... 839

The Growth of Art in the United States .................... 844

Trends in Contemporary American Art .................... 850

The New Deal Art Projects ................................ 856

OF ' OURllTUTIONAL CRISIS ...... 862

SELECTED REFERENCES ....................................... 881

INDEX ...................................................... 915

PART I

The Foundation and Framework of
Social Institutions

CHAPTER I

The Foundations of Social Institutions

The Need and Purpose of Social Organization

VIEWED solely as an animal, man is markedly inferior to many other
members of the animal kingdom. He lacks the strength of the bear or
the elephant, the speed of the leopard or the antelope, the eyesight of the
hawk or the eagle, the ferocity of the tiger, the scent of the bloodhound,
or the endurance of the ox. He has also been unable entirely to offset
the biologically disastrous effects of adjusting himself to locomotion on
his hind legs.

Man has been compelled to compensate for his physical weakness by
cooperative social endeavor with his kind. The individual man in a
primitive state was no match for the cave bear, but through organiza-
tion and cooperative activity he has been able to overcome all other
members of the animal kingdom. Today, our modern firearms, which
are the product of centuries of cooperative effort, enable man, single-
handed, to conquer the most powerful beasts remaining on the planet.
The creation of an articulate language has enabled him to put his culture
on a verbal or symbolic basis, thus making possible the development of
consciously created forms of culture and institutions.1

Another important reason for social organization is the fact that man
is by nature a "social being," as Aristotle once called him. Since mem-
bers of the human race naturally and spontaneously assemble, it became
necessary, even in small and primitive groups, to create some rules to
guide the process of living together. These rules were* not at first the
product of any deliberate plan. Men automatically came together,
struggled for livelihood, and cooperated for defense. In the process, they
created social habits, institutions, classes, and purposive groups; and in
time complex social organization was built up. Social organization was
and is both inevitable and indispensable.

Social organization may seem a vague and forbidding term, and the
treatment of the subject by some sociologists has been made terrifyingly
complex and difficult. But it is easy enough to visualize what we mean

i See L. A. White, "The Symbol : The Origin and Basis of Human Behavior," in
The Philosophy of Science, Williams & Wilkins Co., October, 1940, pp. 451 ff.

3

4 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

by social organization if we but look about ourselves in twentieth-century
society.

We see very few persons wandering about aimlessly, indulging in
strictly individualized musings and day-dreaming, oblivious to what is
going on in the world about them. The great majority of people are
actively engaged in forms of behavior in which their actions are joined
to the efforts of others. We find members of families which provide for
the daily life of most human beings. We see schools, churches, art
museums, courthouses, and the like, where men cooperate to teach chil-
dren, worship God, view the great artistic achievements of the past, and
enforce the laws of the land that protect life and property. Great fac-
tories pour out their clouds of smoke to carry on those industrial enter-
prises which supply our material needs. Railroads carry their products
all over the country, along with a large and varied human cargo. Police
direct traffic and arrest violators of the law. Bands of soldiers may pass,
reminding us of the united power of the government and of wars.
Crowds hurrying to stadiums to witness football games emphasize our
commercialized sports and organized recreation. The radio and the
movies bring before us the thoughts and deeds of man all over the earth
and provide us with entertainment. Stately banks and palatial homes
call our attention to the existence of wealth and property. All these
everyday situations attest the extent and variety of the social organi-
zation which man has brought into being to make human life more
efficient and pleasant.

When we speak of social organization we mean both the efforts of men
to accomplish certain purposes — usually the satisfaction of vital human
needs — and the social groups and structures that result from such efforts.
In other words, social organization has both a functional and a structural
import. In a functional sense, it manifests the collective activities of
mankind to achieve certain desirable ends, from raising children to dis-
tributing goods and fighting wars. Out of such functional efforts arise
groups which carry on these activities, such as the family, the corpora-
tion, the state, and the like. In any comprehensive view, social organi-
zation, in its structural implications, includes the structure of social
groups, the general structure of the prevailing culture of mankind at any
time and place, and the whole framework of social institutions. What
all this involves will become clearer in the course of this and the next
chapter. The full import and extent of social organization can be
grasped only when we keep in mind both the functional activities to
achieve social goals and the structural outgrowth of such social efforts.

When we say that social organization, in a functional sense, is an
effort to achieve certain results, it would seem to imply that all social
organization is the outgrowth of deliberate effort and conscious thought.
Much of it is such, especially in the higher forms of social organization
and the more advanced cultures, but there is a considerable portion of
social organization which is natural, spontaneous and unconscious. The
family, which ia the basic form of social organization, grows out of such

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 5

unconscious forces as sex attraction, filial affection, and the like. Eco-
nomic groups may be stimulated by sheer hunger and cold. Associations
larger than the family grow in part out of the natural sociability of man-
kind, which requires no deliberation. Social organization also exhibits
an unconscious response to many forms of geographical pressure. Even
in those forms of social organization where deliberation plays a large or
dominant role, social activities and structures are strongly influenced by
factors that have an unconscious or habitual basis.

In the most profound sense, however, social organization is a product
of the very nature of man himself. Man's peculiar physical nature and
biological equipment are such that he has been compelled to associate
and cooperate with his fellow-men for the purpose of insuring his exist-
ence, comfort, protection and progress.

The Historical Development of the Forms of
Social Organization

Owing to his inherent physical weakness, man has been compelled to
exploit his natural tendency to associate in groups. While it has pro-
duced a considerable cramping of individual freedom and initiative, this
social restraint is the price that man has had to pay for the indispensable
advantages of cooperative endeavor. The forms of social organization
throughout history have differed widely as to size, complexity of relation-
ships, and clarity and consciousness of purpose. The earliest forms were
mainly brought about by the sex impulse, family life, and the natural
sociability of man, operating in geographic and climatic conditions.
The social groups were small. The relationships of individuals and
classes were rudimentary and simple. There was but slight development
of any rational or conscious purpose in social organization. The general
theory was that the existing forms of social grouping, class distinctions,
and individual relations were the product of divine will — an outgrowth
of revelations from the supernatural world. The progress from these
simple hordes and local groups of primitive society to modern world
organization has been brought about by (1) the gradual education and
discipline of man in group life, (2) the progress of technology, which has
complicated social relationships and given man greater mobility and
more control over his environment, and (3) the growth of intelligence
and a symbolic culture, which has led man gradually to transform natural
and spontaneous types of association into a social organization founded,
to some degree at least, upon a conscious and rational grasp of its pur-
poses and advantages.

In later chapters, we shall trace the history of the various types and
systems of social organization. We can here only pause to indicate the
nature and significance of the development, of the leading types of social
groupings and institutions.

Economic life has advanced from a natural economy, resting upon the
appropriation of the gifts of nature, with the simplest cooperation of

6 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

various members of the family, to modern technology, the factory system,
corporate forms of organization, and world markets. Political life has
passed from the personal domination of the chiefs and elders of a small
kinship group to the modern centralized state, which assumes to control
every field of human endeavor. The geographical scope of political con-
trol has expanded in an equally striking fashion from small groups to
large national states occupying half a continent, while many contemporary
writers predict, as well as urge, the necessity of political organization on
a world-wide scale.

Law has progressed from the customary usages and taboos of primitive
peoples to the great system of law worked out in the Roman Empire and
embodied in the Code of Justinian, the old and famed English Common
Law, the Code Napoleon, the German Imperial Code, and the complex
web of constitutional law, spun out in the course of protecting private
property in the United States. Tens of thousands of lawyers are kept
busy administering law, and the costs thereof run into billions of dollars
annually.

Religious life and organization have advanced from the crude efforts
of primitive peoples to ward off evil spirits and exploit the aid of benevo-
lent supernatural beings to great, world-wide ecclesiastical organizations,
embodying theological aims and religious activities, as well as elaborate
participation in various forms of cultural and social endeavor.

Education has advanced from the simple inculcation of tribal usages
and rites to great national systems of public instruction which, in the
United States, cost some three billions each year. Venerable educational
traditions have arisen, such as Scholasticism,- Humanism and classical
education, scientific and vocational instruction, and education in the
social sciences. Divers schools of education, from traditional discipli-
narians to exponents of Progressive Education, contend for primacy.
There is bitter dispute as to whether education should merely conserve
the heritage from the past or work for a better social order in the future.

Art has moved ahead from crude drawing on the cave walls of the Stone
Age to the great achievements of Periclean Athens, the efflorescence of
the Renaissance, the various national schools of art, the collection of
artistic treasures valued at billions of dollars in impressive museums,
systematic artistic education, and the attempt to make the creation and
appreciation of art a vital phase of modern life and a means of solving
the new problems of leisure.

It is impossible to speak of social organization in an intelligent fashion
unless we keep ever before us the genetic point of view, which emphasizes
the fact that present forms of social organization have developed from
much more simple and rudimentary types in the past, and are undoubtedly
now headed toward even more complicated forms of expression. Social
organization and human institutions cannot be viewed intelligently in a
static perspective. They must be looked upon as part of a great evolving
body of human culture, ever moving towards either greater perfection or
more easily demonstrable inadequacy.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 7

Types of Social Bonds

The first important type of influence for throwing men together in
social groups may be called the geographical factor or the physical en-
vironment. More attractive climate, better fishing or hunting, superior
fertility of soil, better protection against marauding neighbors, favorable
routes of travel, strategic locations of various types, and the existence of
natural resources of high value to the group, from the primitive flint beds
to modern oil reserves and rubber plantations, have served to bring men
together in social groups, from the stone ages to our own day. However,
it need never be assumed that similar geographic influences invariably
have an identical effect upon all groups of men.2 Culture, namely, the
sum total of human achievement, is the dynamic fact in human society
and history. Human nature and group life are too complex in their
character to react with invariable uniformity to the same type of external
influence.

Along with the geographic forces impelling man to associate must be
placed sex attraction and the natural biological process of procreation.
The humSToffspring matures more slowly than the offspring of 'most
other types of animal life, thus requiring a longer period of association
with, and dependence upon, the mother. Since human animals have
always manifested a decisive tendency towards permanent mating, the
family, whatever its subsequent artificial social limitations and controls,
is fundamentally a biological product. It rests upon potent and per-
sistent biological factors. *

When coupled with certain economic situations and juristic concep-
tions, the family may constitute the basis of social organization. This
was particularly true in ancient communities organized around the power
and authority of the patriarch in a simple pastoral or agricultural society.
Here the family set up a rather thorough domination of economic, re-
ligious, cultural, and juristic institutions. Some modern social reformers,
most notably the late Frederic Le Play and his followers, would revive
something like this patriarchal type of family control, and make it the
basis of social reconstruction in our industrial and urban age.

In primitive society, there was also an extremely potent quasi-biological
type of social bond, namely, the element of kinship, real or assumed.
While kinship or, as it has been called, gentile, society, was by no means
universal in primitive society, it was extremely common. Kinsmen were
supposed to be related by blood through descent from some mythical
ancestor, frequently a totemic animal. This kinship notion made such
types of primitive society a strong "closed shop." Kinsmen alone could
function as members of the group, and nfcw members could be brought
into the group only through elaborate forms of initiation, such as blood
transfusion and other forms of symbolic adoption.

2Cf. Roderick Peattie, Geography in Human Destiny, Stewart, 1941.

8 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

The other main biological force acting as a social bond is that of racial
kinship. In so far as race has any scientific significance, it means a
fundamental biological similarity revealed in such things as head form,
facial angle, the cross-section of the hair, pigmentation, and various
structural affinities of a technical nature.

In the early days of human society, racial purity and the importance
of race in social groupings were much more marked than at present.
Today the long and extensive intermingling of peoples, the .growth of
greater tolerance towards racial mixture, and the gradual increase of the
importance of cultural factors have served to reduce the literal importance
of race as a social bond. Yet distinguished writers have never laid more
stress upon the importance of race in society than at the present time.
Racial theories have never had so great a vogue or prestige as they enjoy
in Nazi Germany. Whatever the scientific errors in the current dogmas
about race, the real or alleged factor of racial unity remains a potent
element in the formation and control of social groups. Indeed, Adolf
Hitler built up one of the most cohesive states of modern times around
the revival of the Aryan myth and the alleged creation of a pure Aryan
hegemony in Germany.

Fourth, we may note the psychological bonds in society. One of the
most potent is what F. H. Giddings emphasized many years ago under
the heading of "the consciousness of kind," namely, the pleasurable effect
of the recognition of similarities. This leads like to seek like and to
avoid those unlike themselves. It is the most fundamental factor in
developing social grouping on the basis of pleasure and spontaneous
response. There are a number of other psychological factors of a com-
parable type, such as sex attraction, imitation, and social suggestion, the
nature and operation of each of which has been the subject of elaborate
sociological treatises.8

Another potent psychological influence leading man to group life has
been the reaction to fear of one sort or another, with the resulting aggre-
gation of men into groups for mutual protection. The nature and variety
of these groups have been as varied in their form and extent as human
fears themselves. We can point to the binding of men together to repel
insects, animals, and human enemies, and also to their organization to
resist floods, fires, and the supposed evils and dangers from the super-
natural world. Herbert Spencer once said that the fear of the living
produced the state, and fear of the dead created religion.

Finally, we may discern the gradual growth of a conscious or purposeful
basis for social grouping. Consciousness of kind, imitation, and reaction
to fear originally developed chiefly on a spontaneous or automatic
foundation. With the continued growth of social life, man has gradually
tended to reflect upon its value to him. This has led to a definite desire
to improve and extend the various forms of social organization. Instinc-
tive and intuitive foundations of social life have gradually been supple-

3 Such, for example, as Gabriel Tarde's Laws of Imitation.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 9

mented by conscious purpose and rational control. Social evolution
gradually emerges into social planning.

Very early in the history of human society, similarity of occupations
or vocations constituted a basis for community of interest and the increase
of mutual understanding. This was true even of primitive priests,
hunters, fishermen, weapon-makers, shepherds, husbandmen, and mer-
chants. With the increasing complexity of economic, social, and cultural
life, and the growth of a rational perception of the nature of social
processes, mutual interest, arising out of common occupation or vocation,
has become an ever more effective basis of social organization and group
life. So potent and popular has it become that some writers are urging
the reorganization of society to make the mutual interest of vocational
groups (business, professions, or trades) the basis of social, cultural, and
political life — thus creating a "functional society."

A common cultural outlook and group interests have long constituted
a significant element in promoting group life, as well as in bringing about
social unity. Common language, common historic traditions, a similar
educational heritage and ideals, and relative identity of aesthetic aspira-
tions have served to give groups cultural uniformity, as well as to separate
them from other groups with different cultural ideals and achievements.

Religion has been an important factor in promoting group life and
social organization. It has divided society into the two great religious
groups of priesthood and believers, and has also separated mankind into
vast organizations founded upon similarity of religious beliefs. Equally
important has been the influence of religion upon other forms of social
bonds and social institutions. Religion was originally derived from the
various types of supposed supernatural control over nature and society.
Social systems in the past have been viewed as primarily a product of
divine revelation. Hence the prevailing types of religious beliefs have
constituted a powerful force vindicating and enforcing the existing social
order. Religion has thus been a vital, cohesive factor in itself, and also
has been one of the most powerful forces maintaining the integrity of
group life.

At the apex of all other forms of social bonds, more powerful and
probably more artificial than any other, is the political or juristic bond.
From early days it has been found necessary to have some ultimate
power in society capable 'of controlling mankind, particularly in crises,
and of giving a coherent and permanent direction to the various types of
group life. This external control, existing primarily for the purpose of
maintaining general or public order, has come to be known as the political
factor in society — in historic times it has been called the state. With
the progress of civilization, the state has become progressively more
purposeful, more rational, and in certain ways more tolerant and dis-
criminating. In the recent growth of totalitarianism we may note, how-
ever, a trend towards irrationality and intolerance in politics which may
prove of considerable duration. /

The fact that man has always lived and functioned as a member of

10 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

a social group has left a more definite impress upon his personality and
culture than any other force operating upon human life. The groups in
which man has lived have made it possible for him to develop material
culture. They have also given man his outlook upon life, his chief ideas,
his scale of values, and his dominating loyalties. Without the group of
which he is a member, the human animal would not only be devoid of
culture; he could not even maintain the lowest form of physical existence
in the face of the dangers and difficulties which confront him.

One important point concerning human institutions and culture is that
they differ from all other forms of animal behavior in being based upon
language, communication, and symbolic relations:

The natural processes of organic evolution brought into existence in man, and
man alone, a new and distinctive ability: the ability to use symbols. The most
important form of symbolic expression is articulate speech. Articulate speech
means communication of ideas; communication means preservation — tradition —
and preservation means accumulation and progress. The emergence of the
organic faculty of symbol-using has resulted in the genesis of a new order of
phenomena: a superorganic or cultural order. All civilizations are born of, and
are perpetuated by, the use of symbols. A culture, or civilization, is but a
particular kind of form (symbolic) which the biologic, life-perpetuating activities
of a particular animal, man, assurfie.

Human behavior is symbolic behavior; if it is not symbolic it is not human.
The infant of the genus homo becomes a human being only as he is introduced
into and participates in that superorganic order of phenomena which is culture.
And the key to this world and the means of participation in it is — the symbol4

It is well to keep this fact in mind. Otherwise, we are likely to forget
that social bonds, group activities, and institutionalized forms of behavior
would be utterly impossible were it not for articulate speech and the use
of symbols.

The Leading Forms of Social Groups

The wide range of social bonds analyzed in the preceding section have
led to the development of definite types of social groups. First, we
should note the groups which owe their existence primarily to various
types of geographic pressure or attraction, fin the earliest days, social
groupings were more directly and effectively conditioned by geographic
factors than by any other influence.)

Hunters and fishers collected in swamps and jungles where fish and
game abounded and where nature offered good hiding and protection.
Herdsmen lived on plains where pastures were good. Early farmers
gathered where land was fertile and water was available to stimulate
vegetation.

Though man has overcome the influence of geography to a far greater
degree than in primitive times, the distribution of humanity over the
planet still bears an immediate relation to the environmental factors.

* Leslie A. White, op. cit., pp. 462-463.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 11

Even in the United States, physical factors still exert a powerful influ-
ence over social life and cultural expression. As the late Frederick Jack-
son Turner pointed out, perhaps the most vital fact about American
society today is the existence of sections with distinct types of economic
interests and cultural achievements.5 The geographic situation has
created these sections and given character and expression to their in-
dustrial, social, and cultural life.

-Vrhe psycho-biological bond in human society has produced the family.
This institution not only perpetuates race ; it is also the leading factor in
the education of the young, and has important economic, juristic and
cultural functions as well. Whatever sweeping modifications may take
place in the organization of the family, and however much the educational
function of the family may be improved by the introduction of psy-
chology, sexology, mental hygiene, and pedagogy, it may be assumed
that human society can never dispense with the institution of the family.
It is likely to remain the basic unit in social organization.

The psychological bond in human society can scarcely be held to
produce any unique and permanent types of groups. Rather, it is essen-
tial to the formation of every form of social group because it creates
spontaneous sociability, cultural affinity, or community of material in-
terests. Probably the closest approximation to what may be called a
distinctly psychological form of social organization is the modern crowd
or mob, the behavior of which was studied a generation ago by the old-
fashioned crowd psychologists, such as Gustave Le Bon, and has been
analyzed in recent days much more profoundly by writers like Everett
Dean Martin. Any sound understanding of modern urban life must be
based upon an adequate knowledge of crowd psychology. With the
progress of the movies, the radio, and other new agencies of communica-
tion, entire populations are taking on many aspects of crowd behavior.6

The bond of mutual material interest has been so important in human
society that several schools of historians and social scientists have co6$
tended that mutual interest has been the vital source of group life through-
out history. While this is doubtless an exaggerated conception, no
historian questions the enormous influence which has been exerted upon
the origin and transformation of social groups by common material
interests. This force held together the primitive fishing and hunting
bands. It has likewise created the economic groups which exist today,
such as the various crafts, industrial organizations, labor unions, em-
ployers' associations, trade associations, and agricultural societies. It
has promoted the growth of economic organizations designed to further
definite forms of mutual interest; among these are chambers of com-
merce, rotary clubs, and labftr unions. It lies at the roots of modern
propaganda. Since the Industrial Revolution, human society, for better
or worse, has become economic or materialistic in its scale of values.

5 Turner, "Sections and Nations," Yale Review, October, 1922.
« See below, Chap. XIII.

12 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Today we can probably hold that the economic bond stands next to the
biological in power and extent of influence.

The vocational and professional groups in contemporary society have
grown out of a combination of the bond of mutual interest and the
community of cultural objectives. Such groups embody everything from
the skilled trades to the organizations of surgeons, artists, explorers, and
laboratory scientists. The spirit engendered in such organizations,
having as their goal a more intensive and effective promotion of the
ideals of the group, is one of the most dynamic influences existing today
for the advancement ef human culture. Indeed, many writers are advo-
cating the reconstruction of political life, so as to base representative
government upon vocational groups rather than upon the old territorial
districts which antedate the rise of modern industry and the dominion
of professionalism.

One of the oldest and certainly one of the most persistent forms of
social grouping has grown out of man's interest in the supernatural world
and his hope of maintaining a congenial relationship between it and his
own mundane realm. A fear of the supernatural world, combined with
the desire to exploit it so as to improve his prosperity, was as dominant
a factor in the group life of primitive man as material well-being and
industrial effort are in contemporary culture.

This religious bond has produced the most widely varied forms of
groups, from the totemites and magical brotherhoods of primitive man
to great world churches. It has created such permanent organizations
as the religions of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, as well as
such striking but temporary organizations as the Crusaders of the Middle
Ages.

In our own age the predominantly supernatural motivation of religious
bodies has been supplemented by the desire to use the religious urge to
advance social well-being. This religious social effort has created such
organizations as the Y.M.C.A., the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.H.A.,
the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ, and the Catholic National
Welfare Association.

The cultural bond in human society, like the psychological factors, can
hardly be said to have created special forms of social organization entirely
distinct from economic, professional, or religious groups. There are, of
course, many organizations of artists and of those who wish to support
various phases of art. There are foundations for the support of art, and
schools for artists. Different schools and traditions of art create groups
to further their ideals. The struggle of diverse cultural ideals, in an
effort to promote a particular form of culture or artistic ideal, is a power-
ful factor in the advancement of man's scientific, aesthetic, and educa-
tional life.

The bonds growing out of mutual interest and the need for group pro-
tection have produced our many types of political organization, from the
rudimentary council of elders, the tribal assemblies, and other simple
forms of primitive political life, to a representative federal republic like

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 13

the United States of America. Thoughtful writers have come to the
conclusion that even the great national states of the present time must
be regarded as but a stage in political evolution. There must be some
form of world organization which will avert war and make possible a
more widespread and generally diffused appropriation of the cooperative
effort of man.

Primary Groups and the "We" Group

One of the most important aspects of the analysis of group life and
social organization is the recognition of certain basic and elemental
associations which we have come to know as "primary groups," a term
made immortal by the late Charles H. Cooley:

By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face asso-
ciation and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in
that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the in-
dividual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion
of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes,
at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest
way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the
sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is the natural ex-
pression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aim of his
will in that feeling. ...

The most important spheres of this intimate association and cooperation —
though by no means the only ones — are the family, the play-group of children,
and the neighborhood or community group of elders. These are practically
universal, belonging to all times and all stages of development, and are accord-
ingly a chief basis of what is universal in human nature and human ideals.7

The family, which is the most fundamental of the primary groups, we
have already described as a bio-social unit growing out of sex attraction
and parental and filial love. The play group is partly biological and
partly regional, being founded upon the association of children of neigh-
boring families to express the spontaneous human tendency to play and
mimic. The play group may also develop temporary associations based
on the common interests of playmates. Kimball Young calls this form
of primary group a "congeniality" group.

Primary groups socialize the individual, give him his notions of ele-
mentary justice and social ideals and obligations, train him in the rudi-
ments of social intercourse, and lay the basis for all later expansion of
social contacts and responsibilities. Down to the rise of modern indus-
trialism and urban life, the majority of men had few contacts beyond
primary groups. The current social chaos and disintegration is due in
a large measure to the breakdown of primary groups in our urban-
industrial age and the failure to bring into being any adequate substitute
for the socializing function formerly executed by the primary groups of
an agrarian civilization.

7 C, H. Cppjey, Social Organization, Scribner, 1909, pp.

14 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Primary groups are characterized chiefly by face-to-face association.
Secondary groups may exist without the necessity of all, or even most,
of the members ever meeting in face-to-face situations. Such are scien-
tific associations, political parties, religious denominations, economic
associations, labor unions, and the like. Secondary groups are more
formal and impersonal than primary groups and also more permanent
and purposive in character. They are usually founded consciously to
accomplish a given purpose.

This conception of primary and secondary groups is not, so far, differ-
ent from F. H. Giddings' idea of component and constituent societies.
According to Professor Giddings, component societies are those of a
partially biological or genetic character which are natural, self-sufficing
if necessary, and self-perpetuating. Such are families, neighborhoods,
towns, villages, and the like. Constituent societies, on the other hand,
are not at all genetic or self-perpetuating in a biological sense. They
are consciously created to carry on specific activities; good examples are
corporations, political parties, philanthropic societies, scientific associa-
tions, and religious organizations.

Closely related to the notion of primary and secondary groups is the
distinction between (1) "we-groups" or "in-groups" and (2) "others-
groups" or "out-groups." As Professor Cooley has pointed out, primary
groups ar6 distinguished especially by their "we" feeling. This distinc-
tion between "we-groups" and "others-groups" was especially strong and
important in primitive society, but it is still very potent and constitutes
a fundamental basis of international friction and warfare, as well as of
social conflict and class hostility. The "we-group" is characterized by
spontaneous solidarity, mutual sympathy, loyalty, and pride by the
members of the group. Such groups extend all the way from frontier
families and neighborhoods to great national states. The "others-group"
is made up of those towards whom the "we-group" entertains feelings of
strangeness, suspicion, antagonism, hatred, conflict, and fear.

This sense of "we" and "others" starts with families and neighborhoods
which are suspicious of strange families and neighborhoods. It may
extend to whole peoples, as in the distinction between Jew and Gentile
and Greek and Barbarian. National states are perhaps the largest, most
impressive, and most dangerous expressions of the sense of "we-groups"
and "others-groups." Our own country is, for us, a "we-group," while
foreign countries are, from our point of view, an "others" or "out" group.
Within states we have the divisions into employers and laborers, em-
ployers' associations and labor unions, capitalists and "Reds." Labor
unions are an "in-group" to organized workers, but they are an "out-
group" to employers, especially to those hostile to organized labor. The
distinction applies to the religious field in the case of the non-religious
or irreligious as against the church-going public. There may even be
hostility between different elements in the "we-groups" in national states.
Examples are the rivalry between the Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions (CIO) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the rivalry

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 15

between Catholics and Protestants, and the hostility between different
groups of "Reds," such as Socialists and Communists, or even the bitter
sectarian strifes among the Communists themselves. Upon the possi-
bility of mitigating the "we-group" and "others-group" feeling depends
the prospect of seriously lessening class strife and international war.

Society, Community, and Associations

Another mode of analyzing the nature of social organization has been
suggested by a number of -writers such as Ferdinand Tonnies, Ludwig
Stein, fimile Durkheim, F. H. Giddings, and, particularly, R. M. Maclver.
Professor Madver's conception is derived mainly from Tonnies. He
classifies the chief forms of social organization under the headings of
society, communities, and associations. To him, society is a universal
term which embraces the whole range of human relationships. Social
organization, within the general framework of society, falls into two
main types: communities and associations. The community represents
the result of spontaneous association, growing out of psychic affinity and
community of culture and local interests:

By a community I mean any area of common life, village, or town, or district,
or country, or even wider area. To deserve the name community, the area
must be somehow distinguished from further areas, the common life may have
some characteristic of its own such that the frontiers of the area have some
meaning. All the laws of the cosmos, physical, biological, and psychological,
conspire to bring it about that beings who live together shall resemble one
another. Wherever men live together they develop in some kind and degree
distinctive common characteristics, manners, traditions, modes of speech, and
so on. These are the signs and consequences of an effective common life. It
will be seen that a community may be part of a wider community, and that
all community is a question of degree. For instance, the English residents in
a foreign capital often live in an intimate community of their own, as well as
in the wider community of the capital. It is a question of the degree and
intensity of the common life. The one extreme is the whole world of men, one
great but vague and incoherent common life. The other extreme is the small
intense community within which the life of an ordinary individual is lived, a
tiny nucleus of common life with a sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, and
always varying fringe. Yet even the poorest in social relationships is a member
in a chain of social contacts which stretches to the world's end. In the infinite
series of social relationships which thus arise, we distinguish the nuclei of in-
tenser common life, cities and nations and tribes, and think of them as par
excellence communities.8

By associations Maclver means not only groups but what are also
frequently classified by sociologists as institutions; namely, socially
approved modes of dealing with the more important problems and ques-
tions of social life in the divers fields of human endeavor:

An association is an organization of social beings (or a body of social beings
as organized) for the pursuit of some common interest or interests. It is a

8 R. M. Maclver, Community: A Sociological Study, Macmillan, 1917, pp. 22 ff.

16 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

determinate social unity built upon common purpose. Every end which men
seek is more easily attained for all when all whom it concerns unite to seek it,
when all cooperate in seeking it. Thus you may have an association corre-
sponding to every possible interest of social beings. Community bubbles into
associations permanent and transient, and no student of the actual social life
of the present can help being struck by the enormous number of associations
of every kind, political, economic, religious, educational, scientific, artistic,
literary, recreative, which today more than ever before enrich the communal
life.8

The state is a form of association or institution, but it is distinguished
from other associations by the scope of its interests, the thoroughness of
its organization, and its power to use political law and coercive force.
While it is primarily regulative, negative, and repressive in its operation,
it can achieve much in a positive and constructive way, provided its re-
lation to communities and other associations is properly recognized in
the constitution and in current legislation. The state should control
other associations to the extent of assuring that they serve the interests
of the community in the highest possible degree, but at this point its
interference should cease. Some associations require a higher degree
of state control than now exists, while others need more freedom. The
only scientific policy in this respect must be pragmatic and dynamic and
based on a careful study of the cogent facts.

The Value and Contributions of Social Organization

Without the numerous forms of social organization, human life and
civilization would be quite impossible. Let us indicate some of the ways
in which social organization achieves its very important service.

First and foremost stands the matter of mutual aid. This may take
the form of very simple and direct cooperation, such as the cooperative
aid in agricultural operations, the repulsion of an invader or wild animals,
the putting out of forest fires, or any number of other simple, spontaneous
forms of group endeavor. It develops further in simple forms of the
division of labor, such as the mutual agreement upon the distribution of
'labor during a camping or hunting trip. In our day it has evolved into
the detailed specialization, regimentation, and subordination that charac-
terize modern industrial and social life.

In every case, the power and efforts of the unaided individual are
enormously multiplied and the potential skill and efficiency of society
greatly enhanced. There are many problems and tasks in which the
individual himself, taken alone and unaided, is essentially impotent, but
yield readily to the combined efforts of a group. Further, through a
system in which each individual is assigned tasks for which he is per-
sonally most competent and for which he has the greatest amount of
enthusiasm, we are able to make the greatest possible use of human ability
and energy. Thousands of years ago, in fact, Plato, in his Republic,

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 17

made the division of labor and social specialization the essence of social
justice and the ideal of social reconstruction. Adam Smith revived the
same idea nearly two centuries ago in The Wealth of Nations.

Social organization is also absolutely essential to the creation of social
order and stability. Whatever achievements might be wrought in the
way of industrial effort and artistic creation, these would be extremely
precarious and ephemeral were it not for their protection through those
forms of social control which prevent anarchy, disorder, confusion, and
unlawful appropriation of individual and group products. From the
days of the primitive local group to the modern national state, social
organization has insured to each individual and group the more or less
permanent possession of the products of its efforts.

Finally, there is no such thing as a self-created and self-contained
human individual, except in a purely metaphysical sense. The mature
human personality is not a biological creation, independent of its social
setting. Personality is itself primarily a product of social organization
and can achieve its complete expression only through a well-integrated
adjustment to the forms of society in which the individual finds himself.
The normal individual is preeminently the person who is happily and
effectively adjusted to the social world about him, and satisfied with the
particular tasks which society imposes upon him.

The facts mentioned in the preceding pages summarize the advantages
which have come to man from social organization. But, like all else in
human life, a price has been exacted for these gains. Most notable
among the costs of social organization has been the discipline imposed
upon the individual by the group, with the resulting loss of freedom,
initiative, and independence. Social organization has been brought about
at the price of much social stagnation and intolerance. This has slowed
down social progress, discouraged innovations, and perpetuated outworn
traditions and customs. David S. Muzzey has graphically stated this
important fact about the cost of social organization in the way of generat-
ing intolerance, conformity, and conservatism:

•

The student of anthropology, psychology and sociology comes to wonder how
such moderate progress as we have achieved in toleration has been accomplished.
For unnumbered centuries rigid custom ruled our remote ancestors, To depart
from the ritual prescribed for hunt or harvest, to violate the tabus which em-
bodied the awful sanctions of supernatural power, was to endanger the very
existence of the tribe. At the entrance to every path of independent thought
or individual action stood the angel with a flaming sword in his hand. The
stranger was eo ipso the enemy, the protege of hostile divinities and the practiser
of destructive arts. In the course of time, by ways and from some motives of
which we have no recorded knowledge, some anonymous heroes with hearts of
"triple bronze" dared to break through the sacred bonds of custom— else we
should still be living in caves or huts. But the vast majority, with little courage
and less discernment, went to swell the mass of blind conformity. Realizing, as
we now do, that the few original and innovating minds have had to drag through
the centuries the dead weight of complacent custom, as the small heads of pre-
historic monsters dragged their huge bodies through swamp and slime, we may
wonder that mankind was not permanently mired in intellectual stagnation. . . .

18 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Institutions have supervened to confirm and conserve. They have been estab-
lished by and for men of like belief, like speech, like blood, like habits, to
strengthen their religious, patriotic, racial and social convictions of the superiority
of these institutions to those of people of other beliefs, speech, blood or habits.
Toleration has never been a charter article in the planting of churches, states
and schools. And if, in very recent years, it has made any way in these institu-
tions, it has been by dint of strenuous efforts and by virtue of developments
alien to their original purpose.10

Conservatism, conformity, intolerance, and stagnation, brought about
by social organization and herd discipline, have plagued earlier genera-
tions, and they remain to threaten the very existence of twentieth-century
civilization. They are responsible for what is known as cultural lag,
namely, the failure of our institutional development to keep pace with
the progress in science, invention, and industry. Cultural lag is more
responsible than all other causes combined in producing war, political
corruption, poverty, misery, crime, and other major evils. Indeed, this
resistance to institutional and intellectual changes may destroy civiliza-
tion as we know it today and throw mankind back into chaos and social
disintegration.11

The Modes of Group Activity and Social Control

The most universal and perhaps most elementary means of exercising
social control over the individual and of rendering permanent the influ-
ence of the group is the influence of public opinion, as applied by sugges-
tion, discussion, propaganda, and direct inculcation of commands. While
public opinion, taken by itself, can rarely apply physical force to execute
its mandates, it can bring to bear a very powerful influence through the
desire of every individual to be well thought of by his fellow citizens.
Social disapproval can also bring about very serious practical disad-
vantages to the individual, thus exploiting the power of material interest.'
Along with such informal means as family discussions, the exhortations
of the pulpit, and the rhetoric of the platform, are the more permanent
factors and institutionalized agencies, such as the press, radio, movies,
education, and propaganda. To a large degree, public opinion controls
cultural ideals and values and also public morals, in so far as these are
not brought under the dominion of legislation and the courts.

Another more direct and artificial means of promoting and controlling
group action are specific programs of various social groups. These
programs embody the desires, aspirations, and modes of procedure of
the particular groups, and make possible the organization of group force
behind such specific objectives. Such programs are the objectives of
labor unions, chambers of commerce, cooperative organizations, religious
groups, reform groups, and the like.

10 Essays in Intellectual History Dedicated to James Harvey Robinson, Harper,
1929, pp. 7-S.

11 See Chap. III.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 19

Frequently, group programs are sufficiently ambitious or of a sufficiently
distinct public nature to find their way ultimately into legislation. They
then have behind them the physical force of the state. Once its will is
embodied in legislation, the group can make use of the physical fact of
punishment as applied through the force of the state. It need no longer
rely entirely upon the informal pressure of public opinion; it can evoke
political authority, as expressed in various compulsive organs, from the
standing army to the local constabulary.

The degree to which group policies are enforced, either by the influ-
ence of public opinion or by the physical force of the state, depends pri-
marily upon the cultural conditions existing in any group. As E. A. Ross
and F. H. Giddings have pointed out, the more highly developed the
culture of the society, the greater the unity and uniformity of cultural
ideals, the more widely distributed the material posessions, and the
greater the ethnic homogeneity, the greater the reliance that will be
placed upon public opinion as a sufficiently certain and potent source of
control over group life. On the other hand, the wider the diversities of
culture, material possessions, group ideas, and ethnic derivation, the
more society will be compelled to rely upon the intervention of the state
and upon resort to the various forms and agencies of political coercion.

Society and the Social Organism

For a generation or so after the science of sociology had been launched
a century ago by August Comte, it was devoted mainly to comparing
society to the biological organism. While this notion is no longer re-
garded as being of vital importance, it is illuminating and, when properly
qualified, still has its uses in clarifying the character of social organiza-
tion.

Experts have described the nature of the biological organism and have
shown that the human body is really a great complex of cooperating
cells and physiological systems. Society is likewise a complex type of
•organism:

A mechanical system is a collection of parts externally related; it changes by
an alteration of its parts; and has reference to an end which is outside of itself.
A chemical system is a compound of parts which are absorbed in a whole; it
does not change except by dissolution; and it has no end to which it refers. In
an organism, on the other hand, the relations of the parts are intrinsic ; changes
take place by an internal adaptation; and its end forms an essential element
in its own nature. We see, in short, that an organism is a real whole, in a sense
which no other kind of unity is so. It is "in seipso totus, teres, atque ro-
tundus." . . . We may define it, therefore, as a whole whose parts are intrin-
sically related to it, which develops from within, and has a reference to an end
that is involved in its own nature.12

The first generation of distinguished sociological writers, made up of
such men as Herbert Spencer, Paul von Lilienfeld, Albert Schaffle, and

12 J. S. Mackenzie, Introduction to Social Philosophy, Maclehose, Glasgow, 1895,
pp. 141-143.

20 THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Worms, emphasized the close resemblance between human society
and the biological organism.13 Perhaps the most illuminating discussion
of this subject was that offered by Spencer. He enumerated in clear
fashion the fundamental similarities between society and an organism.
First, both are distinguished from inorganic matter by an augmentation
of mass and visible growth during a greater part of their existence.
Second, as both increase in size they increase in complexity of structure.
Third, the progressive differentiation of structure in both is accompanied
by a comparable differentiation of functions. Fourth, evolution estab-
lishes in both social and animal organisms not only differences but defi-
nitely coordinated differences of such a character as to make each other
possible. Fifth, the analogy between a society and an organism is still
more evident when it is recognized that, conversely, every organism is a
society. Finally, in both society and the organism, the life of the aggre-
gate may be destroyed while the units live on,

On the other hand, there are three important differences to be noted
between society and the biological organism. First, in an individual
organism the component parts form a concrete whole and the living units
are bound together in close contact, whereas in the social organism the
component parts fofm a discrete whole and the living units are free and
more or less dispersed. Again, and even more fundamental, in the indi-
vidual organism there is such a differentiation of functions that some
parts become the seat of feeling and thought and others are practically
insensitive, while in the social organism no such specialization exists;
there is no social mind or sensorium apart from the individuals that
make up the society. A result of this second difference is the third
distinction: that, while in the organism the units exist for the good of
the whole, in society the whole exists for the good of the individual
members.

The theory of the social organism was carried still further by the
distinguished French writer, Alfred Fouill£e, who laid great emphasis
upon the evolutionary and purposeful liature of the social organism,
contending that the social organism is really a contractual one, embody-
ing a specific desire to achieve a definite purpose:

In fact at what moment does an assemblage of men become a society in the
true sense of the word? It is when all the men conceive, more or less clearly, a
type of organism which they can form through uniting themselves, and when
they do effectively unite themselves under the determining influence of that
conception. We have thus an organism which exists because it has been thought
and wished, an organism born of an idea ; and since that common idea involves
a common will, we have a ... contractual organism.14

In .the same way that in a healthy biological organism we must have
cooperative endeavor and a harmonious working of all the subordinate

18 See H. E. Barnes and Howard Becker, Social Thoughts from Lore to Science,
2 Vols Heath, 1938, Vol. I, pp. 677-692.

^14 Alfred Fouillee, La Science sociale contemporaine, Paris, 1888, p. 115. This
view was also shared by the great Belgian sociologist Guillaume de Greef.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 21

physiological systems, so in the social organism, if it is to be as construc-
tive and useful, there must be a harmonious and cooperative functioning
of the various classes and institutions in society:

Social development involves the harmonious development of the constituent
members of society. This is one of the elements of truth contained in what is
called the organic conception of society. To speak of society as if it were a
physical organism is a piece of mysticism, if indeed it is not quite meaningless.
But the life of society and the life of an individual do resemble one another in
certain respects, and the term "organic" is as justly applicable to the one as to
the other. For an organism is a whole consisting of interdependent parts. Each
part lives and functions and grows by subserving the life of the whole. It
sustains the rest and is sustained by them, and through their mutual support
comes a common development. And this is how we would conceive the life
of man in society in so far as it is harmonious.15

Finally, there is no fundamental opposition between the conception of
a highly developed personality and of a properly functioning social organ-
ism. Personality finds its complete expression only in social organiza-
tion and cooperative endeavor, while social organization can exist in an
effective fashion only on the basis of the spontaneous and eager partici-
pation of all the constituent individuals:

It [the ideal society] must include such a degree of freedom as is necessary
for the working out of the individual life. It must include such a degree of
socialism as is necessary to prevent exploitation and a brutalizing struggle for
existence, as well as to secure to each individual such leisure as is required for
the development of the higher life. It must include such a degree of aristocratic
rule as is necessary for the advance of culture and for the wise conduct of social
affairs. . . .

That there is no contradiction between the independence which is now claimed
for the individual and the fact of his social determination, becomes evident when
we consider the nature of that determination and of that independence. That
the individual is determined by his society means merely that his life is an
expression of the general spirit of the social atmosphere in which he lives. And
that the individual is independent means merely that the spirit which finds
expression in him is a living force which may develop by degrees into something
different.16

15 L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory, Columbia University
Press, 1913, p. 87.
• 16 Mackenzie, op. cit., pp. 157-158, 293.

CHAPTER II
A Panorama of Social Institutions

Basic Human Drives

PSYCHOLOGISTS, notably Robert S. Woodworth, have suggested that
human activity grows out of certain basic drives or impulses which are
the spontaneous expression of the human being as a biological organism.
The first of these drives is for self-preservation. There is a basic will-to-
live which is extinguished only in pathological or abnormal situations that
lead to suicide.

Another fundamental drive is for self-perpetuation. This arises out
of the sex impulses, without any conscious relation, at first, to procreation
or the perpetuation of the human race. For hundreds of thousands of
years human beings seem to have had no knowledge that there is a direct
connection between sexual intercourse and the bearing of children. The
desire to perpetuate the family name, the wish to prevent race suicide,
or the thought of providing recruits for a national army, are considera-
tions only of a late period.

A third strong drive is for self-expression. In its origins, this is a
biological urge for the expression of personality in various forms of physi-
cal activity with appropriate verbal accompaniments, and it may be
stimulated by such environmental factors as hunger, physical surround-
ings, temperature, and the presence of other persons. Most psychologists
regard this impulse as less fundamental than the drives for self-preserva-
tion and self-perpetuation. But some students of conduct, notably the
late Dr. Alfred Adler, believe that the drive for self-expression is the
most important of the vital human urges and that its frustration is the
chief cause of mental and nervous instability.

These drives arise in the individual independent of social surroundings
and would manifest themselves even if the individual lived in total isola-
tion. Under normal circumstances they are sharply conditioned by the
fact that man is a social being and dwells in groups made up of other
individuals beset by the same urges. We have already noticed how man's
capacity for self-preservation has been enormously strengthened by the
fact that human groups are far stronger than the isolated individual, who
alone is no match for many other members of the animal kingdom.

Likewise, the drive for self -perpetuation is socially conditioned. The
sex impulses are capable of realization only in the company of a person

22

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 23

of the opposite sex. In any organized society one is limited in the choice
of a person of the opposite sex by social institutions. With the procrea-
tion of children, a family group arises which provides an immediate social
situation and a new form of social control over the drive for self-perpetua-
tion. In highly developed cultures there are elaborate forms of social
conditioning which either stimulate or discourage the drive for self-per-
petuation, such as the encouragement of population growth by military
dictators, the stimulation of sexual activity by lascivious entertainment,
and the birth-control programs of social reformers.

The drive to self-expression would be to a large degree meaningless,
confused, and futile unless exercised in a social setting. While the iso-
lated individual naturally indulges in plenty of physical action, it is
obvious that the more normal forms of self-expression in fighting, work-
ing, playing, art, and music all require a social setting for their manifesta-
tion.

Therefore, we may conclude that while the fundamental human drives
are biological, arising spontaneously in each individual, their expres-
sion is carried out within social surroundings and they are compre-
hensively controlled by the codes which society creates for its guidance.
They may be regarded as the dominant forces leading to social life and
organization. They impel man to action to meet his needs, and the
resulting action leads to social relationships and their control by social
codes and social institutions.

The Human Needs That Arise from the
Basic Drives

The evolution of society may be regarded as an ever more complicated
and efficient effort to provide for the satisfaction of the needs resulting
from the basic drives. Out of the drive for self-preservation arises the
need for food, clothing, shelter, and health. It indirectly but very potently
produces a need for the group cooperation which is essential to the
preservation of human beings in any considerable number over any appre-
ciable period of time. Not only is group life indispensable as a means
of protection against powerful animal enemies but it also makes possible
a more efficient provision of food, clothing, and shelter. Our modern
business enterprise is basically the outcome of the drive for self-preserva-
tion.

Sex attraction, romantic love, marriage, affection for children, filial
devotion, and the desire to provide a livelihood for members of the family
all are needs growing out of the biological urge for self-perpetuation. In
time, more complicated needs are seen to arise from this drive, such as
those for social control over sex expression and. forms of family life, for
population policies, whether designed to increase or restrict population
growth, and for eugenic programs to stimulate the drive to self perpetu-
ation on the part of the abler members of society and to restrict it
among the allegedly lower order of human beings.

24 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

The needs that grow out of the drive for self-expression are innumer-
able Fighting and working are two of the more elemental. There is no
reason for believing that man is biologically a fighting or working animal.
But physical and social surroundings have impelled him to fight and, so
far, only the favored few have been able to live without working. Most
fighting is now a cultural anachronism, though we still fight world wars.
And if we apply our machinery to the service of mankind there will be
less need for extensive work. It is alleged that man has a natural "in-
stinct of workmanship." If this be so, any such impulse to craftsmanship
is more closely related to art than to labor.

Less fundamental but very important needs arising out of the drive
to self-expression are those for play and for artistic and musical expres-
sion. Even animals play, and there is every reason to believe that man
has indulged in playful activity throughout the million or more years in
which he has existed. The play need expresses itself all the way from
the informal games of small and intimate groups to the commercialized
sports which pack one hundred thousand persons into a football stadium
or pile up a million-dollar purse for a championship prizefight. Away
back in the Old Stone Age we find impressive expressions of the artistic
urge in the cave paintings. And primitive peoples have musical instru-
ments and fairly well developed types of musical expression,

The quest for superiority is a definite outgrowth of the drive for self-
expression. This creates a need on the part of some to assert their
dominion over others. It has made an important contribution to the
origins of government and the beginnings of warfare.

Curiosity seems to be another significant outgrowth of the drive for
self-expression. Very early, man began to raise the question of the why
and the wherefore of the matters he observed in daily life. Religion
gave him his earliest answer by suggesting supernatural causes. In due
time, some men doubted this explanation and sought in science and
philosophy an explanation based upon natural causes. Religion, science,
and the conflicts between the two further stimulated the growth of
philosophy. Much of our intellectual life has thus been\ created and
guided by the curiosity of human beings.

Some Outstanding Human Activities and Interests
That Grow Out of Basic Human Needs

' Mankind is definitely conditioned by the physical environment which
he inhabits. On the one hand, there is a great deal of passive adaptation
to the environment as man finds it. ' In warm climates he wears little
clothing and in cold climates he puts on much of it. In the more rudi-
mentary forms of culture the reaction of man to the physical environment
was mainly one of passive adaptation. * As civilization progressed, man
was able, more and more, to subdue nature to his needs. He learned to
domesticate animals, clear ground, raise crops, thus bringing into existence
agriculture — one of the greatest steps ever taken by man in exploiting

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 25

nature for the benefit of humanity. Still later, through science and
technology man learned to dig for minerals and create a metal culture.
Man discovered how to produce and utilize steam power and, later, elec-
tricity. This not only increased his capacity to exploit nature for food,
clothing, and shelter, but also enabled him to travel and communicate ever
more rapidly and over greater space. Physical features like seas and
oceans, which were once insuperable barriers, became agencies for more
facile transportation. Airplanes enabled man to soar easily over moun-
tain ranges that had earlier defied human transit.

/ The bounty and operations of nature have also stimulated other forms
of human activity. Most earlier forms of religion were based upon wor-
ship .and ritual connected with life and death, and the growth and decay
of vegetation. Natural features, such as the heavenly bodies, mountains,
deserts, rivers, seas, springs, and forests contributed their quota of gods
and spirits. Natural cataclysms, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes,
tidal waves, floods, hurricanes, and fires promoted the growth of religion
and superstition. In later days, they stimulated cooperative activities
in repairing the damage done and, when possible, in preventing its recur-
rence. The beauties of nature encouraged travel and made an important
contribution to recreational activities. Very recently in human experi-
ence, man has discovered the folly of unnecessary waste in exploiting
nature and has launched impressive campaigns for the conservation and
replacement of natural resources. K

- The need for health and physical well-being has given rise to a large
number of activities.* Man has sought to discover the cause of illness.
The search for the answer to this problem has led from superstition
and magic to the rise of medical science. * For thousands of years, man
has sought to mitigate the suffering incident to sickness, and to restore
health. This has produced activities ranging from the incantations of
the primitive medicine man to the systematized medical practice of the
Mayo clinic and great urban health centers. In our day, the activities
related to illness and the search for good health cost over four billion
dollars a year in the United States alone.

Closely related to medical practice, and hospital care are sanitary
engineering and public health activities, which have given us our supplies
of pure water for cities, sewage disposal, garbage removal, and innumer-
able other activities reducing the likelihood of infection and the spread
of disease. Health education and safety education occupy the time of
thousands. Child-saving institutions are numerous, although their work
is expensive. Many scholars devote their attention to the departments
of health, medical research, the study of population trends, and other
matters directly related to health and reproduction.

The task of earning a living has produced more human activity than
any. other fundamental need. Indeed, mankind has spent most of its
time thus far in quest of a living. ' Man's search for food, clothing, and
shelter has given rise to the pastoral industry, to agriculture, and manu-
facturing. In order to distribute the food and goods thus produced.

26 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

markets have come into being and great stores have been constructed.
A medium of exchange has been produced to facilitate the exchange of
goods, and a banking and credit system has been built up."

The problem of how to get man to work has occupied the attention of
many, from the days of slave labor to the modern factory and labor
unions. ^The need for training persons to produce more effectively has
given birth to scientific, technical, and vocational education.' The prob-
lems connected with industry, trade, and banking have been the major
causes of the evolution of government and law. Indeed, the government
is assuming ever greater control over every phase of economic life. Many
persons are, for various reasons, unable to make a living and billions of
dollars are spent each year on the care of the indigent and helpless.

The accumulation, protection, and transfer of property, incidental to
making a living and piling up wealth, call forth activities on the part
of numerous bankers, lawyers, and related professional men.

A variety of human needs have contributed to the desire for more effec-
tive transportation and communication. Trade has been one of these.
Man has desired to widen the opportunity for the accumulation of raw
materials and the distribution of finished products. War has been an-
other stimulant to better transportation. Emperors, kings and generals
have wished to move their troops more rapidly and over greater distances.
Government has promoted the growth of transportation. When large
states were created, it was necessary for representatives of the central
government to move rapidly over the domain. One of the chief reasons
for the fall of the Roman Empire was the inadequate technique of trans-
portation and communication for administration over so vast an area.
Travel, curiosity, and recreation have also prompted the effort to secure
more efficient methods of transportation.

These demands for better transportation have given rise to innumerable
activities and achievements. The wheeled vehicle has moved ahead from
the ox-cart to the streamlined train of our day. Water transport has
progressed from primitive rafts to great liners like the Queen Mary.
More recently, man has been able to leave the land and water altogether
•and to soar through the air more speedily and over ever greater distances.
The routes of travel have made headway from pathways through primor-
dial forests and marshes to six-lane concrete highways, four-track rail-
roads, and ship canals. All of these phases of transportation have pro-
vided labor for an ever greater number of scientists, technicians, me-
chanics, and laborers, and have served an ever larger body of persons.

In order to facilitate group cooperation and the exchange of ideas,
man found it necessary to provide effective methods of communication.
First, he worked out a language, which for many thousands of years was
purely a spoken tongue. Some four thousand years ago, he devised an
alphabet which made possible a written language. The mastery of the
art of writing gave us books, periodicals, and newspapers. These required
the creation of libraries for the collection and preservation of literary
products,* These facilities for communication enabled man to create a

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 27

cultural heritage — a civilization based on verbal symbols, that could be
handed down from generation to generation. This is one of the outstand-
ing achievements in which man is superior to the other animals.

The growth of steam power and electricity made possible ever more
rapid transmission of information. The national postal services system-
atized this communication. Newspapers provided for rapid collection
and distribution of news items. The telegraph, exploiting electrical
power, transmitted words more rapidly than steam would permit. More
recently, the telephone and the radio have made possible the instanta-
neous transmission of spoken words. The movies have revolutionized
methods of visual communication. Space and time have been all but
eliminated in contemporary communication.

Various political and social forces have sought to control, select, or
censor the information communicated over the new facilities, thus raising
the problems of censorship and propaganda. Many are engaged in fur-
thering bbth of these, while others are battling against such influences
and seeking to keep the freedom of communication unimpaired.

The needs connected with sex, the family, and the home have given
rise to a wide variety of activities. Love and courtship produce many
activities expressing amorosity, display, and affection. The institution
of marriage requires the activities of those connected with religion and
the law. Homes create problems of architecture and housing. The ne-
cessity of providing a livelihood for the family leads to innumerable forms
of industrial and professional effort. The rearing of a family calls forth
many activities of an educational, religious, and cultural character. The
school, the church, recreational facilities and those connected with art
and music are all involved here.

Families lead to neighborhoods and communities, and the cooperative
activities natural thereunto, such as exchange of work and services, edu-
cational efforts, community organization, religion, and recreation. In
modern urban life the activities within the family are being reduced and
the responsibility for substitute activities is being assumed more and
more by the community.

Probably the most extensive human activities, next to the activities
which grow out of making a living and rearing a family, are associated
with government. These run all the way from the government of a rural
township to the administration of the British Empire. We have town,
county, city, state, national, and colonial governments. As civilization
becomes more complex, there are more and more social relations which
the government has to regulate. As a result, ever more people are em-
ployed in various forms of government activity; and the cost becomes
ever greater. In the United States there are over a million persons
on the Federal pay roll alone, and in 1932 the total cost of all govern-
mental agencies, federal, state and local, was fourteen billion dollars. It
has increased considerably since that time — to eighteen billions in 1938,
and to astronomical figures since 1941.

An important phase of governmental responsibility is that connected

28 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

with law and order, and the prevention of crime. It has been estimated
that the depredations of criminals and racketeers cost at least five billion
dollars a year, and that the money spent on various forms of gambling
is at least that large. The cost of apprehending, convicting, and impris-
oning criminals runs into the billions each year in this country.

Another form of governmental activity which employs a vast personnel
is that related to armament and war. In Europe, in recent years, mil-
lions have been employed directly in war and the munitions trade, and
the United States is now following rapidly in the footsteps of Europe —
indeed, far outdoing Europe in armament production. Even under nor-
mal conditions, over two thirds of our total Federal expenditures go to
paying for wars past, present, and future. The proposed expenditures for
armament in 1941-1942 far exceed the total cost of eight years of the
New Deal.

We may now consider the wide range of activities which grow out of
the drive for self-expression. Outstanding is the matter of play and
recreation. This has been important since primitive times, but it was
first systematized on a large scale in the games of the Greeks and in the
"bread-and-circus" program of the Roman Empire. The development
of informal recreation, supervised play, and commercial sports in the
twentieth century has become so extensive that in the United States alone
about ten billion dollars are spent each year upon it. The automobile
has contributed more than anything else to the recent increase of recrea-
tional activities and the cost thereof. Recreation provides activity not
only for those who participate, but also for those who supervise play,
construct the buildings and other equipment in which it is carried on,
manufacture various forms of pleasure vehicles, conduct the moving-
picture industry, the radio industry, cabarets, nightclubs, and resort
hotels.

A more refined use of leisure time are the many forms of self-expression
manifested in art and music. The activities connected with the arts
have increased greatly. What was once a luxury of the few is now com-
ing to be cultivated by the many. Art and music have been promoted
•for propaganda purposes by the totalitarian states, and in this country
the New Deal subsidized a good deal of artistic development to provide
employment. The deliberate cultivation of community activities has
also contributed notably to the popularization of art and music. We
have community singing, dancing, and art exhibitions. The movies have
done something to popularize art, and the radio has done a great deal to
popularize music. Both art and music are being extensively promoted
through education. There has been a great increase in the number of
art museums, with a capital invested in the United States now exceeding
75 million dollars. The art collections housed therein are valued at over
a billion dollars. Both public and private architecture are constructed
with an eye to beauty as well as sheer utility.

Curiosity, as a product of the drive of self-expression, manifests itself
through the diverse activities associated with religion, science, and

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 29

philosophy. Not only do we have the activities directly connected with
the worship and maintenance of church institutions, but the church also
carries on many activities only indirectly connected with worship, such
as missionary enterprise, medical missions, various forms of social and
community service, and art. The total cost of religious activities runs
into the billions of dollars each year.

Science, which was the amusement of a few amateurs only two or three
centuries ago, has become a major enterprise of the human race. Many
thousands of persons are engaged in scientific activities, the cost of which
certainly amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars yearly. Applied
science or technology provides even greater activity and enterprise and
lies at the basis of modern industrial life.

As a result of the various drives, needs, and activities, the human race
has built up an elaborate social heritage, made up of beliefs, customs,
ideas, and institutions. These are cherished by society, which desires to
transmit them from one generation to another. This has led to the
development of extensive educational activities.

Social Institutions: The Machinery Through
Which Society Carries On Its Activities

The complexity of modern life has been produced by the desire to
satisfy the needs growing out of the fundamental drives for self-preserva-
tion, self -perpetuation, and self-expression. It is obvious that society
could not carry on without some organized effort and direction for its
varied activities. This is supplied by social institutions, which represent
the social structure and machinery through which human society organ-
izes, directs, and executes the multifarious activities required to satisfy
human needs. Walton H. Hamilton has provided us with a comprehen-
sive definition of social institutions:

Institution is a verbal symbol which, for want of a better word, describes a
cluster of social usages. It connotes a way of thought or action of some prev-
alence and permanence, which is embedded in the habits , of a group or the
customs of a people. . . . Institutions fix the confines of and impose form
upon the activities of human beings. The world of use and wont, to which we
imperfectly accommodate pur lives, is a tangled and unbroken web of institutions.
The range of institutions is as wide as the interests of mankind. . . . Arrange-
ments as diverse as the money economy, classical education, the chain store,
fundamentalism and democracy are institutions. They may be rigid or flexible
in their structures, exacting or lenient in their demands ; but alike they constitute
standards of conformity from which an individual may depart only at his peril.
About every urge of mankind an institution grows up; the expression of every
taste and capacity is crowded into an institutional mold.1

In the beginning, human institutions were in no sense the product of
any deliberate effort. Man spontaneously expresses his impulses in liv-

1 Article, "Institution," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,' Macmillan, Vol. 8, p. 84.

30 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

ing. In doing so he develops definite customs and social habits which
seem to. work and are repeated. In due time they become sanctified and
generally a divine origin is attributed to them by early man:

Social institutions are simply social habits which are systematized, instituted
or established by groups, and have still stronger sanctions attached to them than
do simple customs. They carry a step further the establishment of the social
habit through the exercise of authority or compulsion on the part of a group. . . .

Institutions may be defined as habitual ways of living together which have been
sanctioned, systematized, and established by the authority of communities.2

It is appropriate and desirable to summarize concisely at this point the essen-
tial nature of a social institution. A social institution is a complex of concepts
and attitudes regarding the ordering of a particular class of unavoidable or indis-
pensable human relationships that are involved in satisfying certain elemental
individual wants, certain compelling social needs, or other eminently desirable
social ends. The concepts and attitudes are condensed into mores, customs,
traditions and codes. Individually, the institution takes the form of habits
approved and conditioned in the individual by the group; socially it is a struc-
ture, evidencing itself in standardized and ordered relationships and often finding
additional functional effectiveness through associations, organizations, and physi-
cal extensions.8

We may now consider in a little more detail how institutions arise. We
have seen how man's basic drives and needs impel him to action and ex-
pression. At first, he operated in a natural or "trial-and-error" manner.
If these methods were efficient enough to preserve and perpetuate life,
they were accepted by the group and passed on from generation to genera-
tion. In other words, they became social habits, or what sociologists call
"folkways." As the folkways persist, they grow in fixity, prestige, and
power. When folkways become compulsory, and departure brings group
censure and, at times, severe punishment, they have developed into
"customs." Although customs are a powerful control over man and his
behavior, they are usually unconscious in their operation. It is taken for
granted that they are right. In time, certain customs become the object
of rational thought and are judged the best form of conduct known in
meeting a particular need. Such customs are known as "mores." When
definite rules, regulations, codes, and social structures are created to
enforce and perpetuate the mores, they become institutions. As Professor
J. 0. Hertzler puts it:

When interests, ideas, sentiments and beliefs, in the form of folkways, customs,
conventions, rights, and mores, appear in more coherent and rational forms, as
precipitated types of social procedure or more or less definitely organized struc-
tures for regulating the intercourse between the members of social groups, they
become institutions.4

2C. A. Ellwood, The Psychology of Human Society, Appleton-Century, 1925, pp.
90-91.

s J. 0. Hertzler, Social Institutions, McGraw-Hill, 1929, pp. 67-68.
*lbid.f p. 108.

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 31

Perhaps the best summary which has ever been given on the develop-
ment of institutions is that set forth by William Graham Sumner in his
important work on Folkways:

Men in groups are under life conditions; they have needs which are similar
under the state of the life conditions ; the relations of the needs to the conditions
are interests under the heads of hunger, love, vanity, and fear; efforts of num-
bers at the same time to satisfy interests produce mass phenomena which are
folkways by virtue of uniformity, repetition, and wide concurrence. The folk-
ways are attended by pleasure or pain according as they are well fitted for the
purpose. Pain forces reflection and observation of some relation between acts
and welfare. At this point the prevailing world philosophy suggests explanations
and inferences, which become entangled with judgments of expediency. How-
ever, the folkways take on a philosophy of right living and life policy for wel-
fare. . . . When the elements of truth and right are developed into doctrines
of welfare, the folkways are raised to another plane. They then become capable
of producing inferences, developing into new forms, and extending their con-
structive influences over men and society. Then we call them the mores. The
mores are the folkways, including the philosophical and ethical generalizations
as to societal welfare which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as
they grow. . . . They are the ways of doing things which are current in a society
to satisfy human needs and desires, together with the faiths, notions, codes, and
standards of well-living which inhere in those ways, having a genetic connection
with them. By virtue of the latter element the mores are traits in the specific
character of a society or a period. They pervade and control the ways of think-
ing in all the exigencies of life, returning from the world of abstractions to the
svorld of action, to give guidance and to win revivification. ... At every turn
we find new evidence that the mores can make anything right. What they do
is that they cover a usage in dress, language, behavior, manners, etc., with the
mantle of current custom, and give it regulation and limits within which it be-
comes unquestionable. The limit is generally a limit of toleration. . . . The
most important fact about the mores is their dominion over the individual.
Arising he knows not whence or how, they meet his opening mind in earliest
childhood, give him his outfit of ideas, faiths, and tastes, and lead him into
prescribed mental processes. They bring to him codes of action, standards, and
rules of ethics. They have a model of the man-as-he-should-be to which they
mould him, in spite of himself and without his knowledge. If he submits and
consents, he is taken up and may attain great social success. If he resists and
dissents, he is thrown out and may be trodden under foot. The mores are
therefore an engine of social selection. Their coercion of the individual is .the
mode in which they operate the selection. . . . Property, marriage, and religion
are the most primary institutions. They began in folkways. They became cus-
toms! They developed into mores by the addition of some philosophy of welfare,
however crude. Then they were made more definite and specific as regards the
rules, the prescribed acts, and the apparatus to be employed. This produced
a structure and the institution was complete. . . .5

Primary and Secondary Institutions

The fundamental or primary institutions are elemental and sponta-
neous in their origin and development, following the process so well de-
scribed by Sumner. Such are institutions like the family, property, basic
occupations, government, or war. As civilization develops, secondary
institutions of a deliberate character arise. These usually are subordi-

6 W. G. Sumner, Folkways, Ginn, 1907. pp. 30, 32-34, 54, 59, 97-98, 173-174, 521-522.

32 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

nate institutions within the larger field of primary institutions. For
example, government is a primary institution which has evolved sponta-
neously. But a republic is a deliberate form of government and a
secondary institution. Property is a primary institution with a long
evolutionary heritage, while an inheritance tax is a secondary institution.
As stated by Professor Hertzler, "Every operative and controlling activity
of a given society takes place through institutions ranging from those
which satisfy vital and permanent needs to those relatively superficial
and transitory."6

Only recently has mankind approached primary institutions in a
rational fashion, and then incompletely and imperfectly. They are far
more important than the secondary institutions, although the latter are
much more numerous in our day. Let us review some of the more im-
portant of our primary institutions.

Very basic are those connected with industry, for a large portion of
mankind is dependent upon it for existence. Industrial activities have
been institutionalized under various forms. The earliest type of organ-
ization was provided by the family. Slavery constituted another widely
institutionalized form of industrial effort, especially in antiquity. The
gild system of the Middle Ages was followed by the putting-out system,
and then by capitalistic institutions. Agriculture and trade, in the
course of their evolution, have also provided many forms of institutions
within the framework of industrial effort.

Industrial effort and war have combined to create the institution of
property, which at first was mainly though not exclusively communal,
and has since become increasingly personal and private. There have
been varied ways of transmitting property, an interesting example being
the system of primogeniture under which the eldest son inherits the prop-
erty, at least the landed property, of his father. So important and cher-
ished an institution is private property today that other institutions, such
as industry, law, ethics, and education, are in large part devoted to pro-
ducing, protecting, and perpetuating private property.

The primary institution growing out of the drive for self-perpetuation
and the sexual needs arising therefrom has been the family, which has
been organized through monogamy, or the marriage of one man and one
woman, through polyandry, the marriage of one woman to a number of
men, or through polygyny (usually known as polygamy), the marriage of
one man to a number of women. Though an institution existing for
the purpose of procreation, the family has often contributed to other
types of institutional activities, especially those associated with industry,
religion, and education. Another institution growing out of the sexual
needs of man has been prostitution, which was accepted and approved,
even sanctified, in earlier periods of history. Today it is in ill-repute in
most countries of the west and no longer enjoys its institutional prestige.

The need for social cooperation has produced the many and diverse

«Hert*ler> Social InMrtions, McGraw-Hill, 1929, pp, 67-68.

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 33

institutions associated with group life. These include the family, the
neighborhood group, the community organization, the state and govern-
ment, law and the courts, and ethics or codes of right and wrong conduct

At the outset a private or personal affair, war has become so thoroughly
institutionalized that we have a definite law of war and accepted usages
associated with war. Peacetime relations among nations are conductcc
through diplomacy, which has become a leading public institution. At-
tempts are made to avert war through such institutions as arbitration
The relations among groups have given rise to various other institution-
alized forms of behavior. Many of these are provided by attempts tc
further and control trade, such as the institutions associated with inter-
national exchange, tariffs, and trade laws.

The need to travel from place to place has brought about many insti-
tutional safeguards. Travelers have certain rights which are accepted
among civilized states. The passport is a form of secondary institution
which illustrates this matter. Neutrals in foreign states have recognized
rights, and there are well-established practices governing the control oi
trains and ships.

Communication has been widely institutionalized. Fundamental here
is the institution of language. The whole body of learning, including
literature, art, science, and philosophy, represents an institutionalized
accumulation of the methods and results of communication throughout
history.

The activities growing out of human curiosity have been given insti-
tutional guidance and protection. Indeed, religion is one of the funda-
mental primary institutions. At one time it exerted a vast influence over
most other institutions, such as industry, the family, the state, and ethics.
It still has an influence far wider than the field of worship. Within the
fundamental religious institution as a whole there have been specialized
forms of institutionalized religious activity, as exemplified by the several
great world religions. And within each of these there are innumerable
secondary institutions such as conversion, baptism, and various sacra-
ments.

Science is not a fundamental institution like religion, since it has a
very recent origin, but it includes many forms of secondary, or rational,
institutionalized expression which govern research and the distribution
and acceptance of scientific discoveries. Applied science, or technology,
is well institutionalized by the laws and usages associated with inventions
and patent rights.

Play, sports, and recreation, while producing no primary institutions,
have plenty of secondary institutional expression, especially since the
rise of supervised play and commercial recreation. The playground is
one of the major institutions of contemporary urban life. Art and
music are not lacking in institutional framework.

Education is an institution with a long background, but it has become
especially formidable and imposing in our day. Education has the inter-
esting institutional function of preserving and transmitting the other

34 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

institutions. More and more, educators and reformers are suggesting
that education should not blindly transmit the total social heritage but
should criticize and select from it, rejecting that which is obviously out-
worn and erroneous. But, thus far, this critical and selective function
of education has been primarily a dream.

Most of the primary institutions have been mentioned, but the second-
ary institutions growing out of these are almost without number. Take,
for example, the primary institution of government. There are three
fundamental forms of government, even in modern times — monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy. Within democracy, there are usually three
branches of government— executive, legislative, and judicial. The or-
ganization of each of these branches may differ widely in character, but
each variety has become an institution where it exists. Democracies are
usually run by parties, but these may represent a two-party system or a
group system. Candidates may be nominated by caucuses or direct pri-
maries. They may be elected directly or indirectly, by popular vote,
or the decision of special bodies. The legislature may have three houses,
two houses, or one house. Some democracies may be conducted on a civil
service basis, and others be wholly devoted to the spoils system. In some
countries judges are elected, and in others they are appointed. Some
democracies are conservative, while others are radical and make use of
the initiative, the referendum, and recall. But all these expressions of
democratic government — caucuses, primaries, parties, and the referendum
— are secondary institutions which spawn from the parent institution of
government.

The same primary institutions exist among all peoples at any given
level of civilization; that is, all have industrial institutions, property,
families, government, religion, and education. This basic uniformity is
explained by the fact that mankind constitutes only one animal species
and all men are fundamentally alike in their physical makeup. Hence
they manifest the same basic drives for self-preservation, self-perpetua-
tion, and self-expression. In other words, the human factor is a constant,
whether found among the Hottentots or the Eskimo. The fundamental
needs which arise out of these basic drives are correspondingly similar.
The urges to self-expression on the part of human beings have a broad
uniformity. And the physical weakness of man, the same everywhere,
has led him to collect with others in group life:

Both men and their life-conditions are pretty much alike; there is a general
similarity between the expedients adopted for the realization of interests in all
places and times. They have a family likeness. They all reflect the inveterate
conditions of life on earth.7

While this uniformity may be observed in the few basic institutions of
mankind, diversity is the rule with respect to their special manifestations
taken on in time and space.

All peoples are governed in one way or another but the methods which

7 W. G. Sumner and A. G. Keller, The Science of Society, 4 Vols. Yale University
Press, 1927, Vol. I, p. 29.

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 35

are utilized to achieve government are extremely diversified. So it is
with every other form of human institutions. All people normally marry
and raise children but the institutions and practices associated with love,
courtship, marriage, and the status and responsibility of the sexes differ
in a most impressive manner. One can only grasp the real extent of this
diversity by reading such a book as Sumner's Folkways.

But there is one uniformity to be observed in all this diversity. This
is the fact that everywhere people believe that their particular institu-
tions are the right ones and the best ones. In most places, even yet, the
majority of the people regard their institutions as being of divine origin.
This is even true of the attitude of the people of the United States towards
the Constitution, which was made as recently as the late eighteenth cen-
tury by men who deliberately voted in the Constitutional Convention to
keep the name of God out of the Constitution.

Institutions and Social Efficiency

We have pointed out how institutions develop out of human nature.
Human nature gives rise to certain basic drives. These drives create
fundamental human needs. The needs in turn produce activities to
satisfy them. When such activities become habitual and socially sanc-
tioned, they emerge into customs and institutions. But the customs and
institutions themselves are quite distinct from human nature. Human
nature is relatively constant and uniform, while the whole body of insti-
tutions, called human nurture, is diversified and subject to extensive
changes, however gradual such change may be. Man (homo sapiens) has
been on the planet for fifty thousand years — perhaps far longer. But
during all this time, when human nature has been biologically constant,
we have passed from tribal institutions to those of the contemporary
urban-industrial world civilization. Every form of industry, property,
family, social group, government, warfare, religion, and education of
which we have any knowledge has grown up, flowered, decayed, or per-
sisted within this period.

This fact concerning the relative fixity of human nature in a biological
sense should not, however, lead us to take too rigid a view of the character
and workings of human nature. Human behavior is the product of two
forces: (1) the physical and social environment, and (2) the responses
of the physical organism of man to this environment. Though the
physical organism of man may not change, its responses are bound to
alter as new stimuli arise with each radical change in the physical or
social environment. Hence there is no reason to doubt that our human
nature, the same biologically, responds quite differently in a metropolitan
center from the way it did in the simple environment of the cave-dwellers*
The behavior of people in Soviet Russia in 1940, as contrasted with their
behavior under Tsarist auspices in 1910, is a dramatic illustration of the
way in which human responses may change in rapid and sweeping fashion
without any transformation in the biological make-up.

36 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

These considerations have an important bearing upon the frequent
assertion that we cannot get a better form of society unless we change
human nature. If we moved from tribal culture to metropolitan civi-
lization without any change in the biological basis of human nature, we
can bring about relatively minor changes in government or economic life
without a change in human nature. The most suitable human institu-
tions would probably be those which conform most closely to the nature
and needs of man, but thus far there has been little effort to discover the
actual nature of mankind and to identify and establish the institutions
most compatible with this nature. Our institutional life has been mainly
the product of blind groping by peoples encompassed by ignorance, sta-
bilized and transmitted over countless generations. Only those institu-
tions which have been notoriously out of adjustment with human nature
and incapable of satisfying human needs have been discarded. Even
then, such institutions were not deliberately set aside, but the peoples who
clung to them were extinguished by those possessing more adequate
institutions.

Everything known as progress has been a phase or product of our
institutional equipment. Biologically, the man who lived in caves in
the Old Stone Age forty or fifty thousand years ago was just like the man
who lives in metropolitan New York or London. All that separates them
is the result of institutional development. However, the relative efficiency
of institutions at any time remains a very real question. Hence, while
institutions are indispensable and their achievement is impressive, there
remains a very real question as to their relative efficiency at any time.
Certainly our institutions when they arose could not have been very
efficient. They were the chance expedients of ignorant, primitive men.
They were the result of trial and error. They then might be preserved
and approved, even if the margin of success was just great enough to
enable the group to survive. But, even so, the chances are that any
given institution is more efficient at the time of its origin than at any
later time. When it begins, it bears at least some direct relationship to
the conditions of life as it is then lived. But as life conditions change,
the institution usually remains unchanged, gets more and more out of
date and becomes less adequate. Yet social reverence for institutions
has made it impossible for mankind to grasp this elementary truth and
seek to provide institutions better adapted to the new ways of life. It
is certain that all civilizations which have fallen — and all great civiliza-
tions prior to our own day have disintegrated — have done so because of
inadequate and outgrown institutions. The decay of civilizations cannot
be attributed to human nature, for that is the same yesterday, today,
and tomorrow.

The great revolutions which have taken place have invariably come
about when institutions were notoriously out of adjustment with existing
technology and ways of life.8 The dawn of history— the first notable

8 For more detail on the great world revolutions, see pp. 48 ff.

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 37

world-revolution — came when the domestication of animals, the inven-
tion of agriculture, and the improvement of implements and weapons had
given man a technology no longer adapted to the simple life of small
primitive groups. It was a technology suited to conquest, expansion, and
enrichment.

But, in time, all of these processes went further than the underlying
ancient technology warranted. A great Roman empire arose which could
not be administered on the basis of horse and camel transport, courier
communication, and the handicraft industry. It went to pieces in the
second great world-revolution from the third to the seventh centuries
of the Christian era.

The third major world-revolution came when the rudimentary local
and provincial institutions of the Middle Ages were no longer adapted
to the new ways of life initiated by the compass, better ships, world-
trade, the curiosity of explorers, and the greed of merchants. So the
Middle Ages came to an end and modern times came into being between
the days of Columbus and those of Napoleon.

Today, we are trying to control the technology of an age of dynamos,
streamlined trains, airplanes, radios, and moving-pictures through in-
stitutions most of which were already in existence at the time of Napoleon
Bonaparte. The vast discrepancy between our technology and our
institutional life in our day suggests that we are at the present time on
the eve of a fourth great world-revolution.

The main reason why our social institutions get out of adjustment
with our technology — our tools and machines — is that we are far more
deliberate in fashioning and in changing tools and machines. There is
also more obvious and concrete evidence to show us whether or not our
tools, machines, and vehicles are working well than there is with respect
to the adequacy of our institutions. Man has not always been so rational
and deliberate in choosing and altering his technological equipment.
Tools and vehicles were once sanctified, and altered only very gradually
and gingerly. They, also, were thought to be of divine origin. A
famous anthropologist tells of a tribe in Polynesia which used a noto-
riously unseaworthy canoe, while its neighbors had very efficient boats.
But the people with the risky canoe would not abandon it because they
feared that the gods would be angry and drown the whole tribe.

But even in primitive times, as Alexander Golden weiser pointed out
in his Robots or Gods, man was more rational towards his tools than
towards his institutions. He was much more willing to make changes
and improvements in his implements and weapons than in his customs
and ideas. Today, we are almost totally rational in inventing and
adopting new machines. Only vested economic interests in older and
inefficient machinery prevent us from adopting newer and better types.
Mechanical invention has become customary. However, we remain al-
most as superstitious concerning our institutions and their deliberate
alteration as primitive men. "Social invention" is still only a challenging
phrase and a noble dream.

38 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Thus far, changes in human institutions have been accomplished
mainly in an unconscious fashion. The migration of peoples to new
habitats and their contacts with different customs and institutions, revo-
lutionary changes in technology; like the domestication of animals, the
invention of agriculture, the mastery of navigation, the discovery of
metal-working, have forced people unconsciously to modify their intitu-
tions. But there have been few instances, until very recently, of epoch-
making changes in institutions which have been undertaken and accom-
plished in a deliberate fashion.

Proposals to bring about deliberate changes in our institutions have
not been lacking, but those who recommended such action, with the ex-
ception of Plato and a few others in antiquity, have lived in relatively
modern times. The first considerable group of writers to recommend a
deliberate reform of institutions were the Utopian Socialists of the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were followed by Karl Marx
and the Socialists who recommended revolutionary changes. But not
until the totalitarian states of Russia, Italy, and Germany came into
existence was there any wholesale wiping out of existing institutions and
the substitution of a new pattern of life.

Most civilized people hope, however, that a better method of deliberate
social change can be found than the technique of revolutionary totali-
tarianism. Nearly three-quarters of a century ago, Lester F. Ward
suggested that social scientists study institutions and offer recommenda-
tions for their change when they get out of adjustment to the existing
needs. This would insure expert guidance and safeguard against vio-
lence. But, thus far, Ward's benevolent suggestions have received little
popular support and have never been given a comprehensive trial.

One observation may be made with considerable assurance. That is
that the most impressive turning-point in history will come when human-
ity becomes capable of examining its institutions in deliberate fashion
and adjusting them to the service of existing needs.

The Evolution of Social Institutions

Whether or not institutions change and develop with an inevitable
uniformity which can be described and predicted is a question that has
been vigorously discussed. A generation back, social scientists were
much under the spell of the evolutionary doctrines set forth by Lamarck,
Spencer, Darwin and others. Many of them felt that the laws of cosmic
and organic evolution could be carried over and made to apply to the
development of social institutions. Today, there is almost unanimity of
opinion to the contrary.

If there are laws governing the development of institutions, it is evi-
dent that they have no relationship to the laws of organic evolution.
Human nature has not changed for at least fifty thousand years while
human institutions have undergone tremendous changes in this period.
The question is whether there a*e laws which determine the evolution of

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 39

institutions and make their development inevitable and uniform. Let
us review some oustanding opinions on this subject.

The great Roman philosophic poet, Lucretius, suggested that social
institutions might have passed through evolutionary phases. But his
amazingly modern ideas were no more than a hunch. The first writer
to devote a great deal of attention to the question was the French
philosopher, August Comte. Although he wrote before the days of
Darwin, he was much influenced by the evolutionary ideas of the German
and French philosophers of the era of Romanticism and was familiar with
the revolutionary views of Lamarck. In his System of Positive Polity,
he wrote that society passes through three great stages of development:
(1) the theological and military; (2) the metaphysical and legalistic;
and (3) the scientific and industrial. William A. Dunning has sum-
marized Comte 's notion of social evolution: *

1. In the theological and military stage social relations are determined, both
in general and in particular, by force. Conquest is the guiding aim of society.
Industry exists only for the production of the necessities of physical life, and
slavery is the status of the producers.

2. In the metaphysical and legalistic stage the military spirit still predominates,
but industrial conditions are making themselves felt. Slavery gradually gives
way to serfage and then to civil, though not political, liberty for the individual.
The growth of industry is pronounced, but its end is chiefly to promote military
ends. Eventually it becomes itself the most important cause of war. As a
whole this stage is transitional and indeterminate.

3. In the scientific and industrial stage industry has become dominant. It is
the first influence in the relations of individuals to one another, and it tends to
control all the relations of society. Social activity as a whole oecomes directed
to the sole end of production, i.e., to the adaptation of nature to the needs of
man, and in this is the essence of civilization.9

Probably no other writer devoted so much attention to the evolution
of institutions as Herbert Spencer, the eminent English philosopher of
the nineteenth century. He worked out a philosophy of evolution all
his own, and he believed that its principles applied to the physical uni-
verse, to living matter, and to all social institutions. His formula of
evolution was based on the idea of integration and differentiation.
Matter first integrates and then there is a differentiation of the specific
parts or organs, which become ever more perfectly suited to their duties.
Social institutions are subject to the same law. Civilization has passed
through two main stages. In the first, military considerations dominated
social institutions and in the second, industrial life gave color to civi-
lization. F. H. Giddings has admirably condensed Spencer's theory of
evolution and its application to social institutions:

Societies are organisms or they are super-organic aggregates.
Between societies and environing bodies, as between other finite aggregates
in nature, there is an equilibration of energy. There is an equilibration between

9 W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer,
Macmillan, 1920, pp. 30&-394.

40 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

society and society, between one social group and another, between one social
class and another.

Equilibration between society and society, between societies and their environ-
ment, takes the form of a struggle for existence among societies. Conflict be-
comes an habitual activity of society.

In this struggle for existence fear of the living and of the dead arises. Fear
of the living, supplementing conflict, becomes the root of political control. Fear
of the dead becomes the root of religious control.

Organized and directed by political and religious control, habitual conflict
becomes militarism. Militarism moulds character and conduct and social organ-
ization into fitness for habitual warfare.

Militarism combines small social groups into larger ones, these into larger and
yet larger ones. It achieves social integration. This process widens the area
within which an increasingly large proportion of the population is habitually at
peace and industrially employed.

Habitual peace and industry mould character, conduct and social organization
into fitness for peaceful, friendly, sympathetic life.

In the peaceful type of society coercion diminishes, spontaneity and individual
initiative increase. Social organization becomes plastic, and individuals moving
freely from place to place change their social relations without destroying social
cohesion, the elements of which are sympathy and knowledge in place of primi-
tive force.

The change from militarism to industrialism depends upon the extent of the
equilibration of energy between any given race and those of other races, between
society in general and its physical environment. Peaceful industrialism cannot
finally be established until the equilibrium of nations and of races is established.

In society, as in other finite aggregates, the extent of the differentiation and
the total complexity of all the evolutionary processes depend upon the rate at
which integration proceeds. The slower the rate the more complete and satis-
factory is the evolution.10

It was natural that the theory of organic evolution set forth by Charles
Darwin in his Origin of Species should have a wide influence on social
thinking. Many writers of the time, including Spencer, were stressing
the resemblance between human society and the biological organism.
A large group of sociologists, who called themselves "Social Darwinists,"
attempted to apply Darwinism to the evolution of social institutions,
although Darwin himself did not sanction any such procedure. Darwin
had held that the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest is
the key to organic evolution. So the Social Darwinists held that war,
in human society, is comparable to the struggle for existence in the bio-
logical world. On this basis they attributed the origin of government,
social classes, property, and slavery to war and conquest. Many of
them also believed that war purifies the race by killing off the weaker.
They all agreed that war is the most important force in the evolution of
social institutions. This line of thought was bitterly attacked by other
writers, notably the Russian sociologist, Jacques Novicow.

The most thoroughgoing attempt to discover just how far Darwin's
principles and formulas can be applied to the evolution of social institu-
tions was made by Albert Galloway Keller of Yale University.

10 F. H. Giddings, Sociology, Columbia University Press, 1908, pp, 29-30,

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 41

Professor Keller addresses his Societal Evolution u to an answer to the
following question: "Can the evolutionary theory ... be carried over
into the social domain without losing all or much of the significance it
possesses as applied in the field of natural science?" Keller holds that,
so far as the formula of evolution has been adopted by sociologists, it
has been the doctrine of evolution elaborated by Spencer, which, he
thinks, is not a scientific but a philosophic concept. Hence it is high
time that the really scientific formulas of Darwin be appropriated by
sociology, and the doctrine of the "transformation of the incoherent
homogeneous into the coherent heterogeneous" be displaced by that of
"variation, selection, transmission, and adaptation." If it is true, as
Keller attempts to prove, that the Darwinian doctrine is applicable to
social processes, the question arises as to how far society can control this
evolutionary process and artificially improve institutions, as breeders
improve the stock of animals by artificial selection.

In the first place, Keller finds that societal evolution is primarily mental
and not physical. The conception of the "mores" developed by Sumner
is the basis of his theory of societal evolution. By the mores is meant
the ways of doing things which a particular society approves. The
mores are analogous to the germ cells and embryos in the organic world ;
they are the "raw material" through which societal evolution operates.

Keller next proceeds to discover whether or not the main factors in
the Darwinian theory of evolution — variation, selection, transmission
and adaptation — are also exemplified in the evolution of the mores. He
believes that they are.

Variation in the mores is shown by the fact that no two groups possess
identical codes of customary procedure. These variations arise from
the differences among groups in their reactions to the stimulation of
their environment.

Keller finds three types of societal selection — automatic, rational, and
counter. Automatic selection involves no conscious adaptation of means
to a preconceived end, but is effected spontaneously through the processes
of war, subjection, class-conflict, and competition. He has some harsh,
but in the main justifiable, words for those who would put an end to this
natural process of the elimination of the socially unfit:

Sentimentalists, warm of heart, but soft of head, petition complaisant execu-
tives to let loose upon society the wolves that have been trapped and should
have been eliminated once for all; to set the scotched snakes free again. The
pseudo-heroic and pathetic aspects of the life of the black-hearted criminal are
rehearsed until he seems to be a martyr, and the just judge who condemns him
a persecutor and a brute. All of which is done by volatile spirits under the
illusion that they are thereby conserving the delicacy of the 'ethical sense' or
what not, instead of proving recreant to plain duties as members and supporters
of civilized society.12

11 Second edition, Macmillan, 1931.

12 Op. tit.tpp. 114-115.

42 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Rational selection, the social analogue of the breeder's art, takes place
in society, but in different degrees among the various types of mores.
Those mores connected with matters of superstition and sentiment, like
religion and sex, are most difficult to change. Those not thus entangled
open a wider field for deliberate improvement. To a certain extent, the
leaders in thought can determine the direction in which changes in the
mores will occur, but even such persons are limited by the tyranny of
public opinion.

Mores connected with the maintenance of society — industry— are the
least wrapped up in sentiment, and hence rational selection finds its
widest application in the economic field. Every important change in
economic organization is followed by a consequent, though not necessarily
equal, transformation in the other mores. Thus, though it is impossible
directly to modify all social institutions, the changes can be achieved in
this roundabout manner. Therefore, Keller's answer to the question as
to whether society can control its own evolution ends in a new version
of economic determinism. He guards, however, against allowing his
arguments to be interpreted as favoring the socialist propaganda. One
may accept the dogma of the fundamental importance of economic insti-
tutions without giving assent to the Marxian deductions from this prin-
ciple.

By counter-selection, Keller means that type of societal selection
which renders the human race biologically less fit. The modern social
factors in counter-selection, which are described by Friedrich Wilhelm
Schallmayer, are mainly war, modern industry, celibacy, later marriage,
and the sterility of the upper classes. But counter-selection, while dis-
astrous biologically, may have social and cultural compensations.
Societal selection operates primarily among groups rather than in-
dividuals, and hence insofar as it secures social advantages which are
greater than the biological loss, it is to be commended. Keller regards,
the eugenic program advanced by Galton and Pearson as impracticable,
since it involves interference with the type of mores — the sexual — which
is most resistant to rational control.

Transmission, in societal terminology, is not possible in the sense of
biological heredity, but the mores are transmitted through the medium of
tradition, which operates automatically through imitation and inherit-
ance, and artificially through education.

Adaptation in the mores is the outcome of the operation of the processes
of variation, selection, and transmission. Every social custom or
institution is the result of an adaptation of the life of a people to the
environmental conditions which confront them. Even though the par-
ticular adjustment may later be an anachronism, it should not be con-
demned absolutely, for it must have once been useful or it would not
exist. The different forms of government are but one aspect of this
social adaptation to the necessary conditions of social existence.

Keller thus demonstrates the applicability of the Darwinian formula to
the processes of social evolution in a broad general way. It is debatable,

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 43

however, whether we can find any real explanation of the fundamental
social processes in a demonstration of the resemblances between the life
processes of the organism and society.

The most influential book attempting to work out the laws and stages
that govern the evolution of social institutions was Lewis Henry Morgan's
Ancient Society, published in 1877.18 Morgan was a wealthy "business
man who devoted himself to a study of anthropology and attempted to
formulate a scheme of social evolution. It was his notion that human
institutions follow a definite pattern of evolution and that their stages
of development are much the same the world over. This uniformity of
evolution he attributed to the general similarity of basic human wants
and the underlying unity of the human mind:

The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience and one in
progress . . . inventions and discoveries show. . . . the unity of origin of man-
kind, the similarity of human wants in the same stage of advancement, and the
uniformity of the operations of the human mind in similar conditions of society.
. . . The principal institutions of mankind have been developed from a few
primary germs of thought; . . . the course and manner of their development
was predetermined, as well as restricted within narrow limits of divergence by
the natural logic of the human mind and the necessary limitations of its powers.
Progress has been found to be substantially the same in kind in tribes and
nations inhabiting different and even disconnected continents, while in the same
status, with deviations from uniformity in particular instances produced by
special causes. . . . the experience of mankind has run in nearly uniform
channels; human necessities in similar conditions have been substantially the
same and the operations of the mental principle have been uniform in virtue of
the specific identity of the brain of all the races of mankind. . . .

Like the successive geological formations, the tribes of mankind may be
arranged, according to their relative conditions, into successive strata. When
thus arranged, they reveal with some degree of certainty the entire range of
human progress from savagery to civilization. A thorough study of each succes-
sive stratum will develop whatever is special in its culture and characteristics
and yield a definite conception of the whole, in their difference and their rela-
tions. . . ,14

Following out his general evolutionary scheme, Morgan held that
culture everywhere had passed through three stages: savagery, barbarism,
and civilization. In the periods of savagery and barbarism, there were
three stages of development within each. The lowest stage of savagery
lasted from the beginning of the human race to the acquisition of a fish
subsistence and a knowledge of the use of fire. These achievements
introduced the middle stage of savagery. This continued until man
invented the bow-and-arrow, which brought him into the upper stage of
savagery. Man attained the stage 'of barbarism with the invention of
the art of pottery. This entitled him to rank in the lower stage of
barbarism. When man learned to domesticate animals in the old world,
to cultivate corn in the new world, and to build abodes of brick and stone

18 See B. J. Stern, Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist, University of Chicago
Press, 1931.
i*L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, Holt, 1877. Cited in Stern, op. cit., pp. 131-2.

44 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

he entered upon the middle stage of barbarism. When he learned how
to smelt iron and to use iron tools and weapons, he emerged into the
upper stage of barbarism. He entered civilization when he invented a
phonetic alphabet, and created a government based upon territory and
property rather than upon tribal relationships.

In his doctrine of social evolution, Morgan held that man had originally
lived in small and unorganized hordes. Next, man entered what Morgan
called gentile society, based upon real or alleged blood relationship. In
its earliest form, these relationships were traced through mothers, thus
creating a maternal society. In time, relationships were traced primarily
through the fathers, and a patriarchal type of society came about. When
government came to be based upon territorial residence and the posses-
sion of property, the era of kinship or gentile society came to an end and
civil society arose.

Morgan not only set forth theories of social evolution in general, but
also expounded doctrines relative to the evolution of particular institu-
tions such as the family. He held that the family had passed through
a number of forms. The first was the consanguine family, in which
brothers and sisters married. The next type was the punaluan, which
was designed to prevent the intermarriage of brothers and sisters by
imposing a taboo thereupon through a gentile organization. Then came
the third or syndyasmian family, which was a marriage of single pairs
but without exclusive cohabitation. The fourth form of family was the
patriarchal family, consisting of the marriage of one man to several wives.
Finally, man attained the fifth and highest form of marriage, the mono-
gamiany which meant the marriage of one man to one woman with ex-
clusive cohabitation. This last form was encouraged by the rise of
property and its legal transmission to offspring.

No other book ever published in the field of the social sciences has
exerted so great an influence upon our ideas regarding the evolution of
social institutions as did Morgan's Ancient Society. For a generation
it was the bible of anthropologists and sociologists. In the twentieth
century, however, more critical anthropologists, led by Franz Boas and
his disciples, have bitterly attacked Morgan's ideas and have claimed
that his notions of invariable and inevitable social evolution do not
square with observed facts. Perhaps the most complete attempt to
refute Morgan is contained in Robert H. Lowie's Primitive Society.
Most anthropologists and sociologists share Lowie's views. On the other
hand, Leslie A. White, an admirer of Morgan, is now undertaking to
rehabilitate Morgan's general conception of social evolution, without
necessarily approving of all of Morgan's specific notions.

Whatever the deficiencies in the details of Morgan's theory of social
evolution, the dynamic element in it is of permanent value. This rests
upon the contention that culture advances and institutions change as
the technological elements in man's control over his environment are
enlarged and improved. We have noted how Morgan related the stages
in human progress from savagery to civilization directly to the progress

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 45

in weapons, tools, the use of metals, and the domestication of animals.
Morgan also made a contribution of great value in showing how pro-
foundly social institutions have been affected by the institution of prop-
erty and the methods of transmitting it through inheritance practices.
Morgan's stress upon technological and economic elements in institutional
change and readjustment was sound and of vital importance. Its endur-
ing value has been overlooked by critics who have concentrated upon
less important aspects of his evolutionary philosophy and system and
upon errors in matters o'f detail.

While the issue is by no means settled, it is doubtful if there are any
universal laws determining the evolution of social institutions, which
make their development uniform and inevitable, independent of time
and special historical conditions. To hold that there are such laws
would be almost like adopting a sociological version of orthodox Christian
theology or oriental fatalism. The historical evolution of society is not
chaotic or without cause or order, but there is little probability that it
is pre-determined by any immutable laws.

About all that can be done is to formulate rather tentative notions of
social causation. A reasonable view would be something like the follow-
ing: We have as the two relatively constant factors in history the original
nature of man and the geographical environment in a given area, but
these cannot be said to be absolutely static, and they are so involved
with other conditioning influences that their interaction is constantly
varying in nature and extent. The original nature of man, reacting to
a particular form of geographic stimulation, will produce a characteristic
outlook on life. The latter will, in turn, control to a considerable degree
the extent to which science and technology can emerge and develop. The
state of technology rather Sharply conditions the nature of the economic
life which exists in any age and area. The economic institutions tend to
have a powerful conditioning, and sometimes a determining, influence
over the other institutions and cultural elements: social, political, juristic,
religious, ethical, educational, and literary.

Yet this is, in reality, an over-simplified statement of the historical
process. Cause and effect are constantly acting and interacting upon
each other. A few basic mechanical inventions, such as printing or new
methods of transmitting information, may so alter the life of man as
completely to transform the dominating psychology of any age. Again,
certain psychological and cultural factors may at times have sufficient
power to obstruct the obvious dictates of material prosperity. The skein
of historical development is a tangled and complicated one. It is a
profound historian who can solve the problems of historical causation in
any single epoch, to say nothing of making an effort to formulate a
universally valid interpretation of human history as a whole.

Viewing the course of history in a large way, one may say that social
institutions often seem to have passed through some fairly widespread
stages of development of a reasonably clear and distinct nature. We may
illustrate this briefly.

46 A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Government seems to have begun on a family basis and then extended
to clan and tribal government, one's position in government being de-
termined by what is called gentile society, based upon real or fictitious
blood relationship. Between this tribal form of government and purely
civil government, based upon territorial residence and property, there is
an intermediate stage, founded upon personal relationships, which we
know of as feudalism. Civil government has developed through the
city-states, monarchies, empires, representative government, and de-
mocracy. But right now democracy seems to be suffering a setback in
favor of a return to dictatorship in a streamlined setting.

In the field of economic life, industry seems to have been organized,
first in the family, next in special associations of workers known in the
Middle Ages as gilds, then in the putting-out system, and finally in the
factory system. In the accumulation and application of wealth the
first stage was of a personal character, which has been called the napkin
economy, to be hoarded or spent as one wished. In modern times, what
is known as capitalism evolved. This involved a systematic accumula-
tion and re-investment of money in business enterprise to make a profit.
Capitalism itself has passed through various stages of development such
as commercial capitalism, industrial capitalism, monopoly capitalism,
and finance capitalism.

Property was at first mainly communal, though very early in primitive
society there were various forms of personal property and well-recognized
private property rights. From the dawn of history to our own day
property has mainly been held in private possession, and elaborate forms
of legal sanction have been developed to protect private property. More
recently, the state has intruded upon private property rights through such
things as inheritance taxes, and income taxes. In some states, like
Soviet Russia, the state has taken over all property involved in the pro-
duction and distribution of wealth. Marked tendencies along the same
lines have developed in Fascist states.

In the field of technology there was general evolution from the use of
unchanged natural objects, to the invention of the tool, the development
of machinery after the Industrial Revolution, and the appearance of
automatic machinery in the electrical age. Power has also passed
through broad stages of development. First we have the power of the
human hand, next the power of tools, then water power, steam power,
and in our own day the rise of electric power.

The family seems to have shown no evolutionary development within
historic times. The usual type of family has been monogamous. Other
types of family, such as the polygynous and the polyandrian, have been
highly specialized, transient, and the product of peculiar conditions.

Nor do there seem to have been any evolutionary tendencies in those
achievements connected with aesthetics and the fine arts. They do not
seem to follow any definite laws of development, but are spontaneous and
unpredictable. They are, however, almost always colored and condi-
tioned by the general state of economic and political life.

A PANORAMA OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 47

There are some fairly well defined periods in the development of
religion. The first period seems to have been one in which man believed
in generalized and impersonal supernatural power. Then, the super-
natural powers were endowed with personality, in what we know of as
the stage of animism. In time, these personified spirits were divided into
good and evil spirits. Next, man came to conceive of a supreme good
and evil spirit, each aided by a large group of subordinate good and evil
spirits, respectively. This stage was reached by the dawn of recorded
history and there has been no fundamental change in orthodox religion
since that time. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attempts
have been made to promote secular cults, divorced from supernaturalism.
These have ranged all the way from Auguste Comte's religion of Hu-
manity to Communism and Fascism.

A generation ago it was customary to regard these trends in the de-
velopment of institutions as hard, fixed, inevitable, and uniform stages.
We now know that any such idea was over-simplified and untenable.
There are undoubtedly general tendencies in social evolution, but to each
of them there have been notable exceptions. Such developmental trends
help to clarify our notions of historical changes and of the growth of
institutions, but they present no confirmation of the dogma of invariable
social evolution, according to any definite pattern or pre-determined by
any immutable laws.

CHAPTER 111
Cultural Lag and the Crisis in Institutional Life

The Transitional Character of Our Era

ONE OF the most difficult tasks of the historian is to attain clear per-
spective on his own age. It is often much easier to understand the past.
Yet standing by itself, the past has only a musty antiquarian significance.
Once we understand how the past created the present, we may begin to
see what light the past and the present throw on the probable course of
future events.

It is probable that the chief lesson which a study of the past offers is
the overwhelming evidence that we are living in one of the great transi-
tional periods of man on this planet. It is always dangerous to draw
direct analogies with the past, for historical epochs never reproduce
themselves exactly. Attempts, for instance, to find explicit lessons for
our generation in the later Roman Empire are likely to prove misleading.
It is futile to identify, in any detail, a dictatorial, pre-capitalistic, pre-
industrial society and an economy of scarcity with a democratic, urban,
industrial civilization which has attained a potential economy of
abundance.1

Yet certain broad historical analogies are sound, useful, and illuminat-
ing. Most relevant is the suggestion that we are living in the early days
of the fourth great world-revolution in history. The three previous eras
of sweeping social and cultural transformation roughly comparable to
ours were (1) the passage from pre-literary culture to so-called historic
civilization — the dawn of history — somewhere between 6000 B.C. and
3500 B.C., (2) the gradual disintegration of classical culture in the later
centuries of the western Roman Empire, around 300-600 A.D., and
(3) the supplanting of medieval civilization by early modern culture and
institutions between 1500 and 1800.

The conception of a world-revolution is not limited to the violent
change which we usually associate with the word revolution, although,
thus far in human experience, war and civil violence have accompanied
the disintegration of old social orders and the inauguration of new ones.
• By a world-revolution we mean a fundamental change in social institu-

i See such efforts in H. S. Hadley, Rome and the World Today, Putnam, 1922;
and H. J. Haskell, The New Deal in Old Rome, Knopf, 1939.

4?

CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS 49

tions and patterns of life, in the social and economic basis of the control
over human society. A new class of leaders is thrown up. Either new
institutions arise or sweeping changes are made in those which hold over
from an earlier pattern of culture. A new type of civilization comes into
being. The basic patterns of society are reconstructed.

At the dawn of history in the ancient Near East, military chieftains
from the earlier tribal society built up little feudal kingdoms and city-
states. Adroit and powerful rulers of such political units conquered
others and, in time, created kingdoms and empires. They built up vast
wealth, founded on rich landlords and a wealthy commercial class. A
powerful priesthood, it was thought, kept the favor of the gods and
brought supernatural aid to the conquerors. The same process was re-
peated when the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire were created
in later millenniums.

Another great world-revolution took place when Roman imperial
society disintegrated after 300 A.D. and the Germanic tribal chieftains
and kings seized control of western Europe. They built a new social
order founded primarily upon powerful landlords, thus creating what we
know as medieval feudalism. In time, powerful national monarchies
arose, but nothing was created which reproduced the great empires of
oriental and classical antiquity. The manors and guilds dominated
economic life, and Catholic social ethics controlled business and financial
practices. The Catholic Church and Scholastic philosophy reigned su-
preme in the intellectual realm.

Following 1500 another world-revolution came along, this time pro-
pelled chiefly by the rising power of the merchant class — the new bour-
geoisie. At first they supported the kings against their old traditional
enemies, the feudal lords, thus promoting the growth of royal absolutism.
However, the kings became an even greater menace than the feudal lords
had once been; so the bourgeoisie took up arms against the kings and
either displaced them or subordinated them to a system of representative
government dominated by the middle-class merchants and businessmen.

The wars of Cromwell against Charles I, the ousting of James II, the
American Revolutionary War, and the wars of the French Revolution
and Napoleon were only incidental military episodes in the great social
revolution in the course of which the merchant class replaced the feudal
landlords as the dominant class in western society. Napoleon, in any
profound historical sense, was only an instrument of social change hasten-
ing the process, as Stalin and Hitler later sped up the fourth great social
revolution, in which proletarian leaders may oust the moguls of capital-
ism in the dominion of society.

The third world-revolution that produced modern times probably
bears the closest resemblance to our age. In the three centuries follow-
ing 1500, the typical medieval institutions (such as a decentralized feudal
government, an agricultural economy operated according to the manorial
technique, the gild control of urban industry, local markets and national
fairs to facilitate exchange of goods, the theory of the just price and

50 CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS

other moral limitations on greed and sharp business practices, the great
unified international Roman Catholic ecclesiastical state, and the Scholas-
tic system of education) were undermined or completely supplanted.

In their place arose typical institutions of the early modern age — the
centralized national state, first absolutistic and then representative,
farming by free tenants under great landlords, an increasingly commer-
cial and industrial economy, the domestic or putting-out system of indus-
trial control, national and world trade, capitalistic ideals and methods,
the quest of private profits by any means not flagrantly illegal, the great
schism in the Catholic world-state produced by Protestantism, and the
ascendency of Humanistic ideals in education.

Had a scholar suggested in 1500 that the civilization of his age was
about to undergo a sweeping transformation, he would have been ignored
or ridiculed. But just this thing happened. By 1800, medieval civiliza-
tion was no more, except in the more backward parts of Europe.

So, in the second third of the twentieth century, it is hard to believe
that we may be in about the same condition in which the western world
found itself around 1500. Yet plenty of evidence supports the opinion
that we have already instituted more far-reaching changes than any
previous century has ever witnessed — perhaps the most fundamental
transition in man's experience. , There are at least two important con-
trasts between former transitional epochs and our own..

In the first place, the changes which lie ahead of us, for better or for
worse, will probably be carried through far more rapidly than in the past.
The civilization of earlier ages could keep going, in one way or another,
for a long time under adverse conditions. Except for war, invasion, and
devastation, complete breakdowns were infrequent. There might be less
dried beef, flour, and meal for the larder, and less fodder for the cattle.
A more than usual number of babies, calves, and sheep might die of mal-
nutrition ; the standard of living might be lowered in the few towns that
existed ; yet, somehow, mankind managed to get along. Scores of causes
for the decline of Roman society have been suggested by historians, but
despite all these causes it took several centuries to wreck Roman civiliza-
tion. Similarly, the decay of medieval institutions actually began in
the late thirteenth century, but the early modern age was hardly com-
plete before 1800. Even when things were improving in the past, it took
a long time to create a new order.

Our urban industrial world-civilization presents an altogether different
spectacle. «jOur culture is so complex, so delicately articulated, so thor-
oughly based upon an elaborate division of labor — between industries,
between industry and transportation, between city and country, between
nations — that the whole system must work efficiently if it is to work
at all. .

An illustration of this fact was furnished by the "bank holiday" in
the opening days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first administration. Our
industrial system was still operating; transportation lines ran as before;
food supplies were not curtailed; electric current was generated in normal

CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS 51

volume, and so on. There was merely a temporary suspension of the
ordinary credit system, yet the country was in a veritable panic. Had
not a new and colorful administration been installed to give renewed
hope and confidence, there is no telling how serious a breakdown of the
whole structure of capitalistic society might have ensued. One can
easily imagine what would happen if basic industries, transportation,
or food production were entirely disrupted.

Our economic system, if it runs well, can do more for man than any
earlier one, but it exacts a price for this advantage. It demands rela-
tively efficient control and coordination to operate at all. A dynamo can
do much more work than a treadmill, but it needs more expert attention
and is more likely to get out of order if carelessly handled.

The second major contrast between our age and any previous era of
transformation is that the alternatives which lie ahead are far more
sharply contrasting than was the case in any previous period. 'We have
today a mechanical equipment which might enable us to attain a material
Utopia with relatively slight physical effort., 0. W. Willcox has esti-
mated that we could produce all the food that would be required for a
liberal diet on one fifth of the land now under cultivation in the United
States and with one fifth of the farmers now engaged in agriculture. If
we eliminated all waste, we could probably produce twice as great a vol-
ume of manufactured goods as we turn out today.

• We are the first generation in the history of humanity which is able,
to use Plato's phrase, to create a "city of happy pigs." 2 k

Likewise, we have all the intelligence and information necessary to
demonstrate the utter imbecility of war and military activities. If we
could apply this information to statecraft and diplomacy, we could put
an end to the menace of war.

The fact that we have Utopia right, at hand, if we have intelligence
enough to claim it, is a unique experience in the whole history of human-
ity. Hitherto, the Utopian writers have had to dream of the blessings
of some future era, wholly removed from the realities of their own day;
but we do not need a single additional machine or any increase of our
natural resources. Everything which Edward Bellamy dreamed of over
fifty years ago in his Looking Backward is now directly available for us.
• If our generation has unique capacity to enjoy prosperity, security and
world peace, it also faces the possibility of unprecedented calamities and
misery. If we do not succeed in controlling the new empire of machines
in a constructive fashion, there is every probability that the economic
situation will grow progressively worse until the whole capitalistic system
ends in chaos. The breakdown in the United States in the autumn of
1929 shows that unregulated capitalism cannot be trusted to conduct its
own affairs. There is as yet no convincing evidence, except in a few
small states, that capitalism can be regulated and made to work in ade-
quate fashion. In many states it has already reached the condition of
desperation which invites the intervention of fascism.

P See below, pp. 795-804.

52 CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS

Moreover, our unparalleled mechanical equipment might prove only a
liability to the human race. , If the second World War continues for long,
our new and more efficient armaments will serve only to make possible
a more rapid and certain suicide of our culture. It is very generally
agreed by most competent observers that the present democratic and
capitalistic civilization cannot withstand the impact of another long-
continued world war.

In his Shape of Things to Come, H. G. Wells, our most talented social
prophet, predicted a half-century of chaos after the second World War,
to be followed by a new type of civilization, dominated by engineers and
internationalists. That this happy result will follow is purely a matter
of guesswork. But if any civilization is established at the end of the
current World War, it will be markedly different from that which was
known in most of the world in 1939.

In thus facing the alternatives of a material Utopia and world peace
on the one hand and economic disintegration and widespread chaos on the
other, our generation is unique in the experience of humanity. Which
road we shall take will probably be decided by the events of the next
quarter of a century. The decision will tell the story as to whether man
is qualified to make use of those mechanical advantages which the last
century or so has placed at his disposal. During the next two or three
decades, then, the destiny of mankind upon the planet is likely to be
decided for many generations to come.

How the Gulf Between Machines and
Institutions Came About

The first Industrial Revolution, which started in England about 1750,
created our modern methods of textile manufacturing, the new iron and
steel industry, the steam engine, and the beginning of steam navigation
on land and sea. This first Industrial Revolution had hardly been estab-
lished in many countries before a second came on its heels, introducing
the application of chemistry in the steel, rubber, oil, and other industries,
together with synthetic products of many kinds, new methods of trans-
portation and communication, large-scale industrial establishments, and
the like. Today we are in the midst of the third Industrial Revolution —
the age of electrification, automatic machinery, electric control ovef
manufacturing processes, air transport, radios, and so on.

We have giant turbines, four of which can generate more energy than the
whole working population of the United States. We possess automatic
machinery of the most amazing efficiency. One plant can, for example,
turn out 650,000 light bulbs each day, or 10,000 times as many per man as
was possible by the older methods. This automatic machinery can be
controlled by a photo-electric cell, or "electric eye," which is absolutely
dependable and unfailing and all but eliminates the human factor in
mechanical production. We have giant auto buses ; clean, quiet, speedy
Diesel-motored trains; safe, swift airplanes. We have skyscrapers'. Our
bathrooms would fill a Roman emperor with envy. Our system of com-

CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS 53

munication is incredibly extensive and efficient. Our radios would appear
a miracle to persons who died so recently as the period of the first World
War. Our modern printing presses would stagger Gutenberg. We could
thus go on indefinitely through all the provinces of our great "empire of
machines."

Never before has there been any such discrepancy between the mechani-
cal side of culture and the social thinking and institutions through which
material life is controlled. During most of the history of humanity,
social thinking and institutions have been relatively compatible with the
science of technology which existed in any age. Only in the case of the
Greeks and Romans and of ourselves has there been any notable gulf
between machines and institutions.

In the classical period, particularly among the Greeks of Athens and
Alexandria, social institutions and philosophy advanced much further
than science and machinery, whereas our machinery is infinitely more
up-to-date and adequate than our thinking and institutions. The failure
of the Greeks and Romans to promote science and invention so as to keep
pace with their institutions was the major reason for the collapse of classi-
cal civilization. There is a grave danger that our failure to bring our
institutions and thinking up to the level we have attained in science and
machinery may jeopardize if not destroy our own culture.

The reason for this disparity between science and thinking is not diffi-
cult to understand if we are familiar with the history of the modern age.
Social thinking and institutional development since 1500 have not moved
ahead more slowly than in earlier times. What has upset the cultural
balance has been the unprecedentedly rapid progress of science and ma-
chinery since 1750. . Most aspects of modern culture have lent great
encouragement to the development of science and machinery, but they
have given no comparable impulse to the growth of social thinking or
institutional changes. •

Considerable opposition was offered to the rise of modern science, par-
ticularly by religious groups, in the past. The publisher of Copernicus'
great work was alarmed by its possible consequences and wrote a pro-
tective introduction to the book. Giordano Bruno was sent to the stake
because he challenged the old astronomical scheme. Gallileo was haled
before the Roman Inquisition because of his new views on the heavens.
Vesalius was disciplined because of his early work on comparative
anatomy. The early exponents of evolution were ridiculed and defamed
by churchmen. But, in due time, natural science was taken over into
the universities, became highly respectable, and was encouraged by busi-
nessmen and statesmen alike.

It is not so well known that there was, once upon a time, persistent
opposition to almost every significant invention of modern times. In
a notable chapter on "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Inno-
vations" in the important publication, Technological Trends and National
Policy,8 Bernhard J. Stern shows in detail how popular opposition slowed

3 Washington, Government Printing Office, 1937, pp. 39 ff.

54 CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS

down the progress and adoption of important mechanical inventions.
Laws were passed to prevent or to discourage the use of stagecoaches.
Canal owners carried on a propaganda against the introduction of rail-
roads. It was alleged that the boilers of the engines would burst and
kill passengers. Doctors testified that a speed of 20 miles per hour would
be fatal to travelers. The progress of the automobile was delayed for
decades by popular opposition and ridicule, though a steam automobile
was actually invented by Joseph Cugnot in 1769. The English Parlia-
ment in 1861 outlawed horseless carriages. Popular opposition consti-
tuted a serious handicap to the installation of street railways, both horse-
drawn and electric. The public ridiculed and delayed the introduction
of the steamboat. Even world-famous . scientists ridiculed the early in-
ventors of the airplane. There was great difficulty in getting anyone
interested in the telegraph when Morse invented it. The government
refused to buy his patent for a ridiculously low price. At first the
telephone was described as the work of the devil. There was tremendous
opposition to the use of gas for lighting purposes. Likewise, important
newspapers ridiculed Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp. Wil-
liam Kelly encountered ridicule and opposition when he invented the
modern method of making steel. Rioters wrecked the early textile ma-
chinery. The sewing machine was bitterly fought by workers in the
needle trades, and the early agricultural machinery was fought rather
than welcomed by the farmers.

\ However, this hostility and obstruction almost disappeared, and the cul-
tural and institutional trends of modern times began, on the whole, to
favor developments in both natural science and mechanical invention..
It became understood that science protects and prolongs human life and
increases the possibility of financial profit in business and ol employ-
ment for workers. Capitalism, the profit system, and the modern busi-
ness age all became powerful forces stimulating the, growth of science and
machinery. Those whose interests were tied up with the old order of
production naturally opposed inventions, but there was an alert minority
which in time discerned the financial advantages to be obtained by
accepting them.

When the inventions became more technical and complicated and
tended to rest more and more upon esoteric discoveries in natural science,
business threw its influence behind both science and engineering. The
middle class owed its prestige primarily to wealth and economic success,
and it inevitably supported those types of intellectual endeavor which
laid the material foundations for efficient manufacturing and the profits
which flowed therefrom. The progress in chemistry and in air navigation
are conspicuous examples of the way in which even war has promoted
scientific and mechanical progress. Today, though finance and business
on the whole, support and encourage scientific and mechanical progress,
there are still striking examples of business sabotage of inventions which
threaten to undermine heavy investments in less efficient machinery.

CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS 55

In early modern times there was actually a greater impulse to institu-
tional change and to new types of social thought than there was t6 the
progress of science and invention. Between 1500 and 1800, as the Middle
Ages came to an end and modern times came into being, these changes
were mainly the product of the middle class. The middle class repudiated
most types of medieval institutions and social thought. It helped along
the national state and transformed it from an absolutistic to a representa-
tive basis. It developed the ideas of natural law, which placed juris-
prudence behind the protection of property. In conjunction with the
Protestant ministers, the middle class brought into being the capitalistic
system and the eulogy of pecuniary profits. It took an active part in
colonialism and the creation of modern imperialism ; developed an appro-
priate type of political and economic theory to justify the new bourgeois
system; and brought into being the liberal political philosophy, justifying
revolution against the privileged aristocracy and defending outstanding
civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, press, assemblage, religion,
and the like. In economics, it extolled the freedom of trade and the
immunity of business and trade from extensive governmental regulation.

Most of these innovations in political and economic philosophy had
been executed by the close of the eighteenth century. The system thus
created tended thereafter to crystallize to resist change. In this way,
the social influences which, between 1500 and 1800, had strongly encour-
aged the transformation of institutions and social thought, became an
insuperable obstacle to such change in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. It was believed that the interests of the middle class were linked
up with preserving the status quo in institutional life and social thought.
Hence the business and financial classes threw all of their tremendous
power into the maintenance of things as they were in institutional life.
This they did at the very time when they were becoming most enthusiastic
in the way of promoting progress in science and technology. Therefore,
from about 1800 to the present time, the dominating economic groups
in modern society have tended to resist social and institutional change,
while at the same time they have encouraged advances in science and
technology. This is a major reason for the strange and alarming state
of affairs which we face today; namely, the juxtaposition of a thoroughly
up-to-date science and technology and a heritage of social institutions
and social thought which date, for the most part, from around 1800 or
earlier. Conditions in our modern world have, for more than a century,
made strongly for scientific and mechanical advance and for institutional
stability.

Some Social and Cultural Implications of the
Gulf Between Machines and Institutions

One of the most conspicuous things about the mental life of our day
is the contrast in our attitude toward*modernity and efficiency in science
and machinery, on the one hand, and in institutions and social thought,

56 CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS

on the other. We desire, if we have money enough to buy them, the latest
in automobiles, radios, plumbing, and electrical gadgets. We are humili-
ated by any evidence that we are behind the times in such matters. The
average American would be greatly embarrassed to drive a reconditioned
Dodge touring car, model 1920, through the thoroughfares of any of our
main cities. This would be the case even if the car were in new con-
dition. The mere fact that its model was two decades out of date would
provide sharp humiliation for the owner.

But the very person who would be embarrassed by a motor car two
decades behind the times is likely to demonstrate great enthusiasm, if not
sheer reverence, for a constitution a century and a half old, or for an
economic system which was already being extolled by Adam Smith in the
year 1776. The man who expresses great contempt for the transportation
ideals of the horse-and-buggy era usually defends with gusto and convic-
tion political and economic ideas which antedate the stagecoach.

This situation makes it very difficult to do anything to bridge the gulf
between machines and institutions. So long as we are proud of our
institutions and ideas in proportion to the antiquity of their origin, we
have less than any incentive to bring them up to date. Until we are as
much embarrassed by an archaic idea as we are by an obsolete gadget,
there is little prospect of making any headway in the transformation of
our institutional equipment.

Far from taking steps to bridge the gulf by bringing our institutions up
to date, the intellectual attitudes and social values of our era tend to
widen the gulf. We provide all sorts of prizes for scientists and engi-
neers who make important discoveries ; yet we stand in no great present
need of further scientific discoveries, save perhaps in the field of medicine.
Nor do we actually require any additional mechanical inventions. • What
we need more than anything else today are the contributions of the social
inventors — those who can bring our institutions and social thinking up
to date by devising new and better forms of government, economic life,
legal practices, moral codes, and improved educational systems. *

But we have few or no prizes or rewards for the social inventor. At
be.st, he is likely to be ridiculed as a crank and nitwit. In certain coun-
tries he may be imprisoned or shot. The net result is an extension of
the already dangerous abyss between our science and machinery and our
institutional life and social -thought.

It is not surprising to find a sharp contrast between the type of guid-
ance which we demand in the field of science and technology and that
with which we rest satisfied in regard to our institutional procedure. We
want the very finest medical scientists and surgeons we can afford. We
would be inexpressibly shocked at the suggestion that we should call in,
for an operation, the family butcher, who might possess remarkable
facility as a precise meat-cutter. When there is an operation to be per-
formed upon our body, we wish the most competent brain trust we can
obtain. But, for operations upon ,the body politic, with problems far
more complex and technical than any conceivable surgical operation upon

CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS 57

the human body, we let political butchers hack and mangle the body
politic at their will. Hence, we need not be surprised at the vast amount
of bungling which goes on in contemporary political life. Until we are
as willing to call in experts to guide us in our institutional life as we are
to seek their medical services or to request them to repair our gadgets,
there is little hope that we shall be able to deal effectively with the com-
plex problems of contemporary life.

- The discrepancy which exists between our scientific world and empire
of machines and our institutions and social thinking is of the greatest
importance in any attempt to understand the institutional crisis and
the social problems of our age. • The latter are, without exception, inci-
dental manifestations of the gulf between machines and institutions, no
matter what type of social problem or institutional crisis we deal with.
While millions suffered, were on relief, or were ill-fed and ill-housed,
the government paid farmers to plow under wheat and cotton so that we
could have less to eat and wear. Millions have been on relief or in the
bread-line at a moment when the factories and farms were well equipped
to turn out an abundance of goods and food. Our productive potentiali-
ties are fitted to give us all we need in every field of human requirements.
But the distributive processes of society possess nothing like the same
facility in putting goods at the disposal of consumers.

This paradox is easily explained. The productive side of our economic
life, based primarily upon our science and machinery, is, relatively up-to-
date and efficient; the ideas and practices which control distribution and
consumption are, on the contrary, a manifestation and reflection of our
institutional life and social thinking, which are highly retarded, out-of-
date, and ineffective. If we possessed the same efficiency in getting goods
to eager consumers that we possess in turning them out of our factories,
there would be no economic crisis in modern industry. At present, our
clumsy and outworn economic system exacts around $2.30 to get to the
consumers each dollar's worth of goods purchased at the farm or factory
gate.4 If we could get food to the hungry masses as readily as the farmers
can provide it, there would be no crisis in agriculture, no millions denied
the primary necessities of existence.

Take the example of war in contemporary times. -When it comes to
devising and manufacturing bigger and better machinery for the destruc-
tion of humanity, we are able to produce ever better battleships, subma-
rines, tanks, dive-bombers, machine-guns, field and long-range artillery,
and semi-automatic rifles. There seems to be no limit to the intelli-
gence which we apply to improving our war machinery. On the other
hand, we approach the whole social and cultural problem of war on the
basis of attitudes which date back to the period of bows-and-arrows and
the battle-axe, if not the fist-hatchet. r

We pool every intellectual resource of university laboratories and scien-
tific foundations to discover how we may wage war more efficiently. But
we do not apply even sixth-grade intelligence in studying the problem of

*See Walter Rautenstrauch, Who Gets the Money? Harper, 1934, pp. 29-47.

58 CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS

how we might rid the world of the menace of war. Whatever social serv-
ices war may have rendered in early days, it has now become a fatal
anachronism and, perhaps, the chief threat to the preservation of con-
temporary civilization. It does not require even high school intelligence
to see that war is a stupid monstrosity. Yet the very best brains of the
world are still employed to facilitate its deadly ravages. As matters
stand, our failure to bridge the gulf between war machinery and our insti-
tutional approach to the war problem may ultimately wipe out much of
our present civilization.

The Institutional Lag in Contemporary Culture

• The most advanced knowledge in the field of economics, politics, or law
is as up-to-date and accurate as that which dominates the scientific
laboratory and schools of engineering. But very little of this new
knowledge is brought to bear upon the control of our institutions in every-
day life. Indeed, we ridicule the very notion that it should be. Roose-
velt's institution of a very limited brain trust was hooted and derided by
most Americans — even intellectuals. We may now take a few pages to
document the assertion that most of our institutional life and social think-
ing dates from the eighteenth century or earlier.

Our opinions and institutions have altered but slightly in a century
and a half. Any person who was a member of the Constitutional Con-
vention in 1787 would be completely amazed if faced by our modern
material culture, but he could discuss economics, politics, law, education,
and religion with a contemporary American citizen. Indeed, even the
average member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would be
thought dangerously radical by a reactionary Democrat, a typical mem-
ber of the Republican National Committee, a member of the Liberty
League, or the Dies Committee.

Anthropologists have described the primitive mind as characterized
chiefly by an all-pervading supernaturalism, credulity, lack of precise
and logical thinking, and ignorance of scientific methods and results.
Judged by these standards, it is obvious that a great majority of Ameri-
cans are still overwhelmingly primitive in their ways of thinking — as are
the people of nearly every other country. A. M. Tozzer of Harvard pub-
lished some years ago an admirable little book on primitive culture, en-
titled Social Origins and Social Continuities. As an appendix he included
an exhibit of the persistence of ancient superstitions in the themes sub-
mitted by Harvard freshmen to the department of English. He showed
a striking hang-over of the primitive belief in luck, chance, and other
pre-scientific attitudes and devices.

Many still believe it is good luck to see the new moon over their right
shoulder, or to find a four-leaf clover. Many believe that it is a bad
omen for a black cat to cross their path. Many fear to light three ciga-
rettes on one match, or to start a journey on Friday the 13th. Many
think it bad luck to break a mirror. Many continue to attempt to tell

CULTURAL LAG AND SOCIAL CRISIS 59

fortunes by tea leaves, daisy petals, and the like. Many flip a coin to
determine what action to take, and knock on wood to avoid bad luck.
Many continue to pray for rain, good crops, health, and the like. Many
still adopt mascots, which are reminiscent of the primitive totemic ani-
mals. Astrological columns in the newspapers are read by millions with
interest and respect.

Our fundamental ideals and institutions came into being between 1500
and 1800. Capitalism was a product of the ethical ideals of the Protes-
tants and the economic ambitions of the early merchants. Between them
they elaborated the fundamental notions and practices of the capitalistic
system. The virtues and validity of the profit motive as the chief incen-
tive to economic activity were expounded by the pastors of early modern
times, particularly the Puritan ministers. Under the influence of Calvin
they emphasized God's approval of accumulating wealth through business
activity and extolled the virtues of thrift and industry. The persistent
ideals of complete liberty for economic enterprise and of the emancipa-
tion of the latter from governmental interference were formulated by the
Deists, the Physiocrats, and Adam Smith in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. The economic ideals embodied in Herbert Hoover's
book, Challenge to Liberty, and in the pronouncements of John W. Davis
and other Liberty League potentates, differ in no fundamental degree
from those set forth' in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which appeared
in the same year that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
When, early in the present century, the American coal magnate George F.
Baer stated that our modern businessmen are unquestionably "those
Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control
of the property interests of the country," he was only echoing the senti-
ments which were much more elaborately expressed by James Mill, J. B.
Say, and others in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Our attitudes and usages with respect to property are equally full of
primitive vestiges. The notion of the unique sanctity of property is in
part an outgrowth of primitive magic, mysticism, and superstition. Our
contemporary view of property rights is a compound of ancient legalism
and of the prevailing sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant views
of God's approval of thrift and profit. To these have been added the
seventeenth and eighteenth century notion that the chief purpose of the
state and legal institutions is to protect private property. Nothing more
modern than this is necessary to explain the majority decisions of the
Supreme Court of the United States on matters pertaining to private
property in the twentieth century. Critical writers, like Hobhouse,
Tawney, and Veblen, have subjected the whole conventional theory of
property to searching re-examination, but their views have been, for the
most part, ignored. When they have been considered at all they have
been bitterly attacked as un-American or Bolshevistic. There is little
or nothing in current American conceptions of property rights which
cannot be discovered explicitly or implicitly in the writings of John Locke
and Sir William Blackstone.

60 CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS

Our political opinions and institutions represent a mosaic mainly com-
pounded of: (1) veneration of the state, derived from the oriental em-
peror worship and early modern nationalism; (2) the classical obsession
with the merits of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; (3) archaic
views of representative government, which developed between the six-
teenth and eighteenth centuries; (4) Rousseau's notion of popular sov-
ereignty and the general will; (5) the seventeenth and eighteenth century
doctrine of natural rights; (6) the eighteenth century view of the per-
fectability of man, linked up with the nineteenth century enthusiasm
for democracy.

While plenty of dynamic and vital political doctrine is expounded by
up-to-date thinkers in the field, this has found but slight adoption in
practice and there has been singularly little effort to adapt our political
institutions to the needs of an urban industrial age.

Law is still based primarily upon oriental usages and conceptions, on
the formulations of the Roman jurists, and on the precedents of the Eng-
lish Common Law. Very little progress, indeed, has been made in the
way of introducing the historical and sociological point of view in the
reconstruction of juristic theory and practice in America.

The legal ideals which have dominated the conservative majority of
the United States Supreme Court in their decisions upon property issues
in the last 75 years have been based upon the theories of natural law
which were worked out by Grotius, Althusius, Pufendorf , and John Locke
in the seventeenth century. This has been well brought out by Charles G.
Haines in The Revival of Natural Law Concepts.5 The rules of legal
evidence are hopelessly out of date and confused. In many ways, they
are almost exactly the opposite of the principles and processes applied
in the field of scientific evidence, which are designed to ascertain the
actual truth in regard to some specific problem.

The attitude taken by the courts towards crime and criminal responsi-
bility is a composite of archaic legalism, religious superstition, and meta-
physical illusions. With the exception of certain advanced work in
juvenile courts, there is but the slightest recognition of the modern socio-
psychological conception of human conduct and its relation to the causa-
tion of crime. Even in the field of insanity, where the conventional legal
conception of the free moral agent is in part suspended, the test for in-
sanity is strictly legal and not medical. In a notorious case in Ohio —
that of Mr. Remus — we witnessed the amusing spectacle of a group of
learned and logical physicians branding the defendant as legally sane
but medically quite irresponsible.

We have been especially reluctant to bring our notions of sex and the
family into harmony with contemporary scientific and aesthetic consid-
erations. Our sex mores and family institutions embody: (1) a primitive
reaction to the mystery of sex and of women in particular; (2) Hebraic
uxoriousness and conceptions of patriarchal male domination; (3) patris-

8 Harvard University Press, 1930.

CULTURAL LAG AND SOCIAL CRISIS 61

tic and medieval views regarding the baseness of sex and sex temptation,
especially as offered by women; (4) the medieval esteem for virginity in
women; (5) the sacramental view of marriage, which leads us to regard
marriage as a theological rather than a social issue; (6) the property
views of the early bourgeoisie; and (7) the Kantian rationalization of
personal inadequacy and inexperience. There are very few items in the
sex mores of a conventionally respectable American today which square
with either science or aesthetics.

Our educational system has changed little when compared with the
vast alteration of our ways of living. • Certain basic strains in our edu-
cational doctrine are derived from the oriental and medieval notion that
the chief purpose of education is to make clear the will of the gods or of
God to man.% From the Greeks and Romans came the high esteem placed
upon training in rhetoric and argumentation as the prime essential of a
successful career in politics. Humanism contributed the view that the
classical languages embody the flower of secular learning and represent
the most exquisite form of literary expression. The democratic phi-
losophy of the last century supported the idea that everybody is entitled
to participate in a complete system of education, and that educational
opportunities should be equal for all. But we went on teaching little
democrats the same subject-matter that had been designed, centuries
before, to fill the minds of the children of the feudal nobility and the
squirearchy — thus strikingly illustrating the fact of cultural lag in the
field of education.

The punitive psychology, which still dominates the greater part of our
educational procedure, was derived from the Christian philosophy of
solemnity and of the need for exacting discipline of the will.

Education in the natural and social sciences and in technology was re-
garded for a long time as relatively unimportant, and even today it
occupies not nearly so great a part in our educational system as the older
currents in our curriculum. Horace M. Kallen has observed that educa-
tion today is more of a distraction from life than a preparation for it.
Few of the real problems involved in living intelligently and successfully
in an urban and industrial world-society are touched upon vitally in our
educational system, from the kindergarten to the graduate school. Nor
has there been much effort to work over our educational methods in har-
mony with the modern psychological truism that vivid personal interest
is the only sensible basis of a dynamic educational scheme. In the
matter of social change, organized education is overwhelmingly lined
up with conservatism and the status quo. Indeed, it is extremely pre-
carious for a teacher even to advocate in the abstract that education
should assume the responsibility for guiding humanity to a better day
and a more adequate social order.

Journalism has not as yet achieved any considerable success as a
method of accurately informing the public with respect tofcontemporary
issues and providing general educational direction in regard to the prob-
lems of modern life. It is still chiefly a method of continuing the whole-

62 CULTURAL LAG AND SOCIAL CRISIS

sale dissemination of the old brand of neighborhood gossip in an age
when the neighborhood has disappeared and face-to-face gossiping has
become ever more inadequate and impossible. The same subjects that
made juicy gossip in the pre-newspaper days still constitute the best copy
for the contemporary newspapers. Personalities are much more highly
esteemed than principles. 'No scientific discovery of modern times, no
engineering achievement of our age, and no social reform program enunci-
ated in our day has received the same publicity as was bestowed upon the
kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby or the birth and destiny of the Dionne
quintuplets. » No newspaper which has made a serious effort to devote
itself primarily to public education on vital topics of economic, political,
and sociological import has been able to survive.

Religion is probably the most archaic element in our culture, and the
most reluctant to take cognizance of contemporary developments in
knowledge and life. The fundamentalists — viewing the term broadly —
among whom are numbered the majority of religious communicants today,
live under the domination of the same intellectual and emotional patterns
as prevailed in primitive times. William Jennings Bryan openly de-
clared at the Dayton trial in 1925 that no statement whatever would
appear to him preposterous or unsupportable, provided it be found in
Holy Writ. Even a majority of liberal theologians today are in rebellion
mainly against seventeenth and eighteenth century religious, ethical, and
philosophic views. Probably not one per cent of modern theologians are
really adjusted to contemporary knowledge and ways of thinking. At
best, a majority of them are attempting to express archaic views in con-
temporaneous phraseology, though some courageous religious reformers
have squared their views with modern science. tThat religion is slower
in readjusting itself to new ways of living and thinking than any other
phase of human culture was admirably demonstrated by the study of the
relative change of opinions and attitudes in American culture since 1890
embodied in Dr. and Mrs. Lynd's book Middletown.6 Religion is the
primary intellectual factor that discourages a candid and secular ap-
proach to the reconstruction of human knowledge and social conduct in
many other fields.

\The greatest danger that faces contemporary civilization is this alarm-
ing discrepancy between our natural science and technology on the one
hand and our opinions and social institutions on the other. * Modern civi-
lization is like a man with one foot strapped to an ox-cart and the other
to an airplane — with one set of loyalties to a windmill and another to a
dynamo.

This sort of situation cannot continue indefinitely. Unless we can
bring our thinking and institutions up to date, the ultimate collapse of
civilization is inevitable. At present, far from closing the gap, the tend-
ency is for the divergence to become ever greater. Our technology is
progressing with dizzy speed, each year making more remarkable strides

6 Harcourt, Brace, 1920.

CULTURAL LAG AND SOCIAL CRISIS 63

than ever before. At the same time, the forces of social conservatism
seem to be getting stronger. The outlook, then, is not too optimistic.

Are We Living in a Scientific Age?

The above discussion enables us to comment intelligently upon the
frequent assertion that we are living in a scientific age. The fact is, of
course, that we are not doing anything of the sort, so far as the attitudes
of the average citizen are concerned.

%, The mass of mankind in Western civilization was, it is true, vastly
affected in an indirect way by the progress of nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century science. New mechanical devices and conveniences vitally
altered people's lives. > Men were healed of diseases more surely and
more often and operated upon by surgeons more successfully and more
painlessly. In popular magazines and newspapers they read superficially
about the wonders that modern science had uncovered. They looked
through bigger and better telescopes, and through more powerful micro-
scopes, to instruct or amuse themselves with respect to the heavens or the
minute wonders of the animal and vegetable worlds.

However, as we have said in connection with technological advance,
the mode of thinking of men in the Western world was very slightly
altered by the direct impact of science. To be sure, the perspective of a
man who has traveled across a continent in a streamlined railroad train
must be somewhat different from that of one whose travels have been
limited to an ox-cart within a rural township. But a transcontinental
railroad trip may not prevent a person from thinking about the funda-
mental problems of life and society much as his grandfather did two gen-
erations before while jogging along with a horse and buggy.

Such is the situation with Western civilization as a whole. In their
thinking about God, the world, man, politics, law, wealth and economics,
education, and the problems of right and wrong, most men are as much
dominated by custom, tradition, folklore, and habit in 1942, as they were
in 1642. The power of the supernatural over human thought has been
but little affected by scientific progress. Tradition and emotion, rather
than fact and logic, prevail. Belief and conviction are supreme.

Our opinions and institutions are overwhelmingly the product of con-
tributions from the pre-scientific era. * In our age, civilization has been
profoundly affected in certain respects by scientific discoveries and their
application to our material cultures Thus mankind, still primarily pre-
scientific in its thinking and life-interests, has been able to appropriate
the results of the investigations and achievements of a few scientifically
minded pioneers. Probably fewer than 500 individuals have been respon-
sible for the changes in the material civilization that separate us from the
days of Columbus and Luther. Modern civilization is a venerable para-
site unintelligently exploiting the products of contemporary science and
technology.

Very often those who most greedily accept and enjoy the products of

64 CULTURAL LAG AND SOCIAL CRISIS

modern science and technology engage in attacks upon the scientific ap-
proach to life. Not infrequently, persons who are most exacting in their
demands for the most recent provisions in plumbing, the best medical
attention, the most efficient and up-to-date automobiles, at the same
time defend classical or medieval civilization as the ideal period of human
development. Many a plutocrat riding about in a Rolls-Royce is at the
same time disporting an intellect which could be matched in most respects
by the mental attitudes of a cave-dweller in the late Paleolithic period,
or of Tecumseh or Sitting Bull.

Many might gather from the above discussion the impression that our
social thinking, in being frequently so archaic, is well-organized, coherent,
static, and clear-cut. This is decidedly not the case. While it has a
common denominator of antiquity, our conventional social thought is
often confused, shifting, and contradictory. The uncertainty and dis-
agreement in the traditional camp is due in part to the clash of class inter-
ests and the changing lines of defense of conventional society. Bankers,
for example, favor free trade, while manufacturers are prone to support
a protective tariff. Employers and laborers, while they may both espouse
the economic principles of Adam Smith and Ricardo, have radically
different attitudes towards the wage problem and collective bargaining.
Political parties rationalize their struggles for the spoils of office in terms
of conflicting ideologies, which may have only one point in common —
their mutual departure from the realities of history and social science.
Conservative educators may quarrel over the necessary degree of intellec-
tual discipline, while mutually ignoring the relation of all education to
social change and social planning. The New Deal was devoted to the
effort to save capitalism, but it was regarded by "Economic Royalists"
as dominated by Muscovite ideals and motives. Liberal theologians
attack Fundamentalists no less vigorously than they do the formulators
of a rational theology.

Not only do all traditionalists frustrate and delay a scientific attack
on our social problems; their differences among themselves weaken the
efficiency and coherence of the traditional order of society.

In short, the real problem facing modern civilization is to make this
age actually a scientific one, in which we will insist not only upon con-
temporaneous bathtubs but also upon intellectual and social assump-
tions harmonious with up-to-date plumbing. In a truly scientific age a
man would be as much humiliated and disgraced to defend the literal
inspiration of the Bible or to oppose birth-control as he would be today
if he were compelled to travel daily down Fifth Avenue, New York, in an
ox-^cart, or to use stone implements in eating his soup at a metropolitan
banquet.

If we are to bridge the gulf between machines and institutions and
bring our social life up to date, we must develop and apply the social
sciences in our institutional life to the same extent that we have cultivated
natural science and technology in building the empire of machines.
This fact has been amply emphasized by Professor Robert S. Lynd in his

CULTURAL LAC AND SOCIAL CRISIS 65

courageous and realistic book, Knowledge for What? 7 This book is, it-
self, a modest effort to subject our institutional life to the scrutiny and
analysis of social science. The degree to which it has succeeded will be
measured by the extent to which the reader gains a better understanding
of, and a more dynamic attitude towards, the institutions and social
problems of our age.

7 Princeton University Press, 1939.

PART II
Economic Institutions in an Era of World Crisis

CHAPTER IV
Some Phases of the Evolution of Industry

Some Suggested Stages of Industrial Evolution

ONE OF the chief institutional efforts of mankind has been that related
to the task of making a living — the customs and institutions that Sumner
and Keller call the "mores" of self-maintenance. But industry has long
been impelled by other forces than the sheer quest for livelihood. Greed,
envy, emulation, the quest of the prestige and leisure which accompany
wealth and property, have been almost as potent stimuli to industrial
effort as has been the material need for food, clothes, and shelter. Indeed,
within historic times, those who have controlled and directed industry
have been only incidentally concerned with satisfying their direct ma-
terial needs. They have been motivated chiefly by the prestige and
leisure associated with wealth. Providing a livelihood for the masses
would be a very easy task today if our industrial organization were
directed to this end alone, or even mainly to this end.

Though the term industry is usually limited to some form of manu-
facturing, we shall cover at least briefly the collection of herbs, berries,
and nuts, hunting and fishing, pastoral life, agriculture, manufacturing,
and trade. But we shall differentiate manufacturing industry from other
forms of effort and treat of outstanding periods or stages in its evolution.

A generation ago, when the idea of social evolution dominated social
and economic thinking, it was very usual for economic historians to
outline so-called stages of economic evolution. These were supposed to
'be rather universal and to have followed each other in uniform sequence
everywhere over the planet. Since different criteria of progress and a
variety of economic items were selected for special emphasis by economic
historians, these alleged stages of economic evolution varied widely. We
can illustrate this more thoroughly. If one took as the chief criterion of
economic development the dominant type of economic effort, the stages
outlined were likely to be something like the following:

The economy of collectors — natural foraging, hunting, and fishing.
The pastoral economy.
The agricultural economy.
The commercial economy.
The industrial economy.
The financial economy.

The governmental economy — state capitalism or state socialism.

66

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 67

If the methods by which industry is carried on are singled out as a
basis for classification, agriculture is usually divided into the periods of
the hoe culture, the plow culture, and mechanical agriculture. Manu-
facturing industry has been divided into two broad stages: the handicraft
or tool era and the age of machines and the factory system since the
Industrial Revolution. Another form of differentiation has been to stress
the sequence of technology in the use (1) of natural objects, (2) of tools,
and (3) of machines. If the mode of power used constitutes the test, we
find the sequence of hand power, water power, steam power, and electrical
power. If major stress is laid upon the place where labor has been
applied to produce goods, we often find the following sequence suggested:

The home.

The small shop.

The gild establishment.

The putting-out system in the home.

The factory.

The super-factory.

Here is another classification based upon the same general point of
view:

The family economy.
The village economy.
The town economy.
The city economy.
The metropolitan economy.

If the economic historian has been chiefly interested in the methods of
applying and controlling labor, the following stages are frequently
separated:

The family system.

The gild system.

The putting-out system.

The factory system under private enterprise.

The factory system under state capitalism or state socialism.

Another way of dividing economic stages has been related primarily
to the evolution of money and credit. One familiar classification along
this line is that of:

The natural economy — exchange by barter.
The money economy.

The credit economy ("the promise men live by," according to Harry Scher-
man).

Another scheme, expanding the same basis of differentiation to include the
pattern of economic control, is:

Individual production for one's own needs.
The exchange economy.
The capitalistic economy:

Commercial capitalism.

Industrial capitalism.

Monopoly capitalism.

Finance capitalism.

State capitalism.

68 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

A broad classification, based upon both occupations and industrial
technique, is that proposed by Richard T. Ely: *

The hunting and fishing stage.
The pastoral stage.
The agricultural stage.
The handicraft stage.
The industrial stage:

Universal competition.

Concentration.

Integration.

If one were to seize upon the dominant objectives and activities of
economic life, one could discern the following stages of development:

The collecting economy.

The pastoral-agricultural economy.

The commercial economy.

The manufacturing economy.

The financial economy.

The state economy.

A recent and illuminating classification of economic development,
based upon the dominating type of technology, has been proposed by
Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization.2 Leaving aside very early
forms of economic effort in the hunting, fishing, pastoral, and agricultural
periods, he divides the rise of the machine economy into three stages:
(1) the Eotechnic or dawn age of machine technology, resting on a fire,
wood, and water basis and involving such things as the water wheel,
wooden ships, printing machinery, and simple clocks; (2) the PaZeo-
technic or early machine age, based on coal and iron and embracing the
inventions and devices we customarily associate with the first Industrial
Revolution; and (3) the Neotcchnic or recent machine age, depending on
electricity and alloys and embodying the technological advances we shall
describe in this chapter as the later stages of the second Industrial
Revolution.

These attempts to differentiate economic life into stages of growth and
change help to clarify one's approach to the evolution of industry and
provide a clearer perspective on economic evolution. But we no longer
believe, with the older evolutionary writers, that there can be some all-
inclusive scheme of stages that takes into consideration all the outstand-
ing factors in the evolution of industry. Nor do we any longer concede
that these stages, even when relatively valid, apply everywhere in the
same degree and have always succeeded each other in uniform sequence
among civilized peoples in all parts of the earth. There is much over-
lapping in any scheme of classification and evolution, however sound
and suggestive. Even in our own era, when manufacturing predominates
over agriculture as the outstanding form of industrial effort, agriculture

1 Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, Macmillan, 1903.

2 Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 69

still remains vitally important in our economic life, as also do the pastoral
industries. When viewed with these qualifications, the notion of eco-
nomic stages may still be highly useful to students in attaining a broad
perspective on industrial progress.

Outstanding Aspects of the Evolution
of Agriculture

The Origins of Agriculture. For nearly a million years mankind
had no formal industrial life, if industry is interpreted according to con-
ventional usage. There were no domesticated animals and no agricul-
ture. There was no manufacturing industry, save for making the
weapons and implements used in a hunting and fishing economy. For
three quarters of a million years man did not even have stone weapons,
and he lived simply by picking up what he could of fruits, grasses, roots,
berries, and nuts. If he lived on animal flesh or fish he could only use
such of these as he caught in his hands and was willing to consume un-
cooked. In the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, man continued to gather
berries, herbs, and nuts but he also provided stone and bone implements
to aid him in hunting and fishing, and he mastered the art of making fire,
so as to cook some of his food. He also domesticated dogs. It was not
until the New Stone or Neolithic Age began, perhaps as early as 18,000
years ago, that man domesticated other animals and took up early types
of agriculture. Economic life before Neolithic times is generally known
in economic history as the era of collectors, or the collecting economy.

Agriculture dates from the Neolithic Age. It was indeed a great dis-
covery when man found that he could plant seeds and get a crop in
return. Perhaps man, as G. Elliot Smith suggests, "began agriculture
as an irrigator." It may have happened, once it was recognized that
the soil became most fertile where it had been covered by a flooded
stream, that man simply imitated the action of the river. He then,
perhaps, made artificial depressions, where water could gather and in-
crease the productivity of grain that still grew wild and naturally. It
is also possible that the discovery of agriculture was woman's achieve-
ment. In primitive times, women usually brought the grain and food
plants to the home, and it may be that an alert woman noticed that where
some seeds or bulbs had been dropped the plants themselves appeared the
following spring. Thereafter, she may have done the planting con-
sciously. Some anthropologists believe that not a sown species but a
plant with side shoots, like a banana, or a tuber (taromyam)y was the
first to be cultivated.

The Nile Valley was blessed with natural conditions most favorable to
agriculture — warm climate, rich soil, and enough moisture — and there
is evidence that cereals have been cultivated there for some ten thousand
years. On these grounds, Egypt is often held to be the original source
of systematic human agriculture.

We have evidence that Neolithic peoples were familiar with barley,

70 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

wheat, millet, peas, lentils, beans, apples, and certain other fruits, and
flax, which was used for textile purposes. There were no plows; pointed
sticks served at first to grub up roots and dig holes, and later agriculture
was carried on in the crude fashion known as "hoe culture." While early
agriculture yielded little, and simply supplemented the food supply pro-
vided by hunting and fishing, it did revolutionize the life of primitive
man. Georges Renard writes cogently as follows:

A new civilization arose with the growth of agriculture. The peoples who
adopted it, submitted to endure disciplined, regular daily work accomplished
often by a co-operative effort according to the seasons. They had a hearth,
a home lit up at night by the oil lamps, surrounded by a stockade. They
took root there where they were born, where their dead were buried. Eaters
of bread, they had gentler manners and began to hold cannibalism in detesta-
tion. Within their villages there thronged a dense population, which was
fundamentally peaceful and formed a whole in which peasants and workers
lived amicably side by side. Every change of environment causes a change in
habits, ideas, beliefs, and the change that wedded man to the soil, fixed him
on the land and for the first time gave him a country, was an enormous one.3

Another real step in advance was achieved during the Neolithic period
through the domestication of the more common animals. There is no
agreement as to whether animals or plants were domesticated first. Per-
haps the two processes took place at about the same time. It may be
that man did not begin to raise animals until he had a relatively fixed
home and a clearing, or perhaps he was able to build homes because he
was no longer fully dependent on the chase for meat. Speculation aside,
we know that the domestication of cattle, swine, sheep, and goats was
achieved before the close of the Neolithic Age. These animals were not
bred at the outset for drawing the plow or wheeled vehicles, for these
did not appear until well along in the metal ages. They served first of
all as a reserve of food, and were also valued for their milk or skins. It
was later that man "condemned them to hard labor." No early use of
swine is, however, known to have existed in pre-literary Egypt. Nor
was beef eaten in early Egypt, Babylonia, or China. Milking, however,
w#s often a late practice of primitive animal-breeders.

Agriculture in the Ancient Near Orient. Agriculture and the pas-
toral industries achieved striking advances in the ancient oriental cultures
of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria. Additional types of animals were
domesticated, and we also find at this time the first domestication of
fowls. The most important animals domesticated in this period were
the donkey, horse, mule, and camel. The donkey was domesticated in
Egypt, and the domesticated horse first appeared in western Asia around
2200 B.C. The hybrid mule became common after the introduction of
the horse, and the camel became popular in the late Assyrian period in
western Asia (c. 700 B.C.) and in the Ptolemaic period (c. 300 B.C.) in
Egypt. Further, we have in the oriental period the first evidences of

3G. F. Renard, Life and Work in Prehistoric Times, Knopf, 1929, pp. 131-132.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 71

the selective breeding of domesticated animals for specialized purposes.
Also, domesticated animals ceased to be exploited solely for their flesh,
skins, or milk, and many of them came to be utilized for draft purposes.

Agriculture was revolutionized. More and better cereals were dis-
covered, and the technique of cultivation was improved, even to the
extent of including a practicable seed-drill hundreds of years before the
Christian era, though this machine did not enter permanently into the
agricultural technique of European civilization until the eighteenth cen-
tury of our own era. A crude plow made its appearance, and hoe
culture gradually disappeared. Likewise the wheeled vehicle, destined
to play so stupendous a part in the subsequent history of mankind, was
brought on the scene by the Sumerians as they emerged from the Caspian
area, possibly about 4000 B.C. The technique of storing a water supply,
with the associated practice of irrigation, was elaborately developed by
both the Egyptians and the Babylonians. Among the Egyptians there
was a highly centralized governmental control of the grain trade.

Instead of the crude agriculture of the Neolithic, practiced on partially
uncleared lands and on relatively small plots, with frequent abandonment
of each settlement (except for those associated with the lake dwellings) ,
there arose large, permanently cultivated estates. Slave labor was
widely applied to agriculture. Another epoch-making transformation
carried agriculture beyond mere production for family use, to the pro-
duction of a surplus of grain for sale. In short, the ancient Orient, for
the first time, created large-scale agricultural operations on a permanently
cultivated site. There was little revolutionary progress in agricultural
technique or organization beyond these oriental achievements until the
Agricultural Revolution in western England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.

We may further illustrate the character of ancient oriental agriculture
by a description of how it was carried on in ancient Egypt. By No-
vember, the overflowing Nile recedes, and the land is dry enough to work.
The plow of the ancient Egyptians was a clumsy implement. One man
controlled the plow and the other drove the oxen which drew it. Fre-
quently the peasants themselves drew the plow when only the crust of
the soil had to be broken up. A wooden hoe was used to pulverize the
soil after the plow had turned it up. Seed was scattered broadcast and
then trodden in by herds of sheep. Wheat and barley were the usual
grains cultivated; millet was also sown. Ancient Egypt likewise seems
to have produced onions, cucumbers, peas, beans, lettuce, leeks, radishes,
and melons. The olive was cultivated in certain parts of Egypt, and
vineyards were generally plentiful. Flax and cotton were grown to be
used in weaving.

The harvest time of the ancient Egyptians fell in our spring. For
cutting grain the peasants used sickles of metal or wood with a cutting
edge of flint. Wheat and barley were cut just above the middle of the
stalk, which made the threshing easier. The straw, left standing in the
fields, was later used in the manufacture of bricks. Men usually did

72 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

the reaping; women followed them and gathered the grain. The grain
was threshed out on the ground with flails, or oxen and donkeys were
driven over the straw to tread out the grain from the husks or hulls.
Winnowing, generally the task of the women, was done by throwing
the grain and chaff together up into the wind, so that the chaff might be
blown away. Then the grain was stored in granaries, and a suitable
harvest festival was celebrated.

The most useful domestic animals of the Egyptians were the ox and
the donkey. The horse was not introduced until after 1750 B.C., and
never assumed much importance in the cultivation of the soil. Sheep
and goats were the other most common domesticated animals. Geese
(highly regarded by the Egyptians) , ducks, swans, and doves were domes-
ticated rather early. The chicken, unknown in early Egypt, was later
introduced from India. The camel, the animal we inevitably associate
with Egypt, was not used as a beast of burden until the Ptolemaic period
— very late in Egyptian history.

The agriculture of Egypt was the source of its power and was by far
the most vital occupation. Nevertheless, the servile agricultural laborer
was regarded with social contempt. The life and the activities of the
peasant population were regimented and controlled by the revelations of
the gods and by the edicts of the quasi-divine rulers. The Pharaoh,
through his officials, decided what crops were to be cultivated and in
what fields they were to be grown, and then determined what percentage
of the yield would be given to the government. In return, the rulers
undertook irrigation and reclamation projects on a large scale, and gave
the farmers such police and military protection as they needed.

Agriculture in Greece and Rome. Agriculture, in spite of the de-
velopment of trade and industry in Athens, always remained the basic
occupation in ancient Greece. The soil was not well suited for cultiva-
tion, but it is clear enough that most of the citizens of Athens lived on
their land, or at least on its products. The Greeks regarded the culti-
vation of the soil as the "most honored profession," as Xenophon declared.
In Periclean Athens (c. 430 B.C.), about one half of the citizen body
possessed medium-size holdings, another group almost as large had only
tiny fields to till, and about one fortieth of the body of citizens can be
described as large landowners. The large as well as the small landowner
usually lived on his land himself. But the tendency for the wealthy
landowner to become an absentee landlord and leave the estate to the
care of a manager was present early and continued to grow.

Agricultural methods were rather crude. To enable the relatively un-
productive soil to recuperate, it was usual to let each field lie fallow in
alternate years. Artificial fertilization was little used until the fourth
century B.C., when improved methods were introduced and some more
advanced cultivators adopted the three-field system in place of the old
two-field system.

The more common cereals of Greece were wheat, barley, millet, and
spelt. Wheat could be grown successfully only on the more fertile land.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 73

Among vegetables, peas, beans, onions, garlic, and leeks were the most
widely grown. The fruits were numerous — olives, apples, pears, quinces,
pomegranates, figs, dates, and grapes. Flax was extensively cultivated
for the manufacture of Greek clothing and house linen. Goats and sheep
were numerous, the former being the chief source of milk and cheese for
the Greeks. Donkeys and mules were abundant, but there were few
cows. Horses were rarely owned except by the very rich, and even then
chiefly in Boeotia and Thessaly. Most of our present-day domesticated
fowls — though not the turkey — were raised.

The soil of Greece was ill adapted to the production of cereals, and
the Greek mainland depended more and more upon imported wheat from
Sicily, Egypt, and the Black Sea region. The common tendency among
the Greek states on the mainland was to specialize its agricultural pro-
duction. Athens concentrated on the culture of olives and grapes for
export. After the fifth century, B.C., it is evident that the city-state
was rarely able to be a self-sufficient economic unit. The problem of how
to feed the constantly increasing city populations became distressingly
difficult.

Roman agriculture underwent tremendous changes between the small
farms of early Republican days and those of the declining Empire, when
cultivation was chiefly carried on by large landowners on great estates
with the forced labor of coloni and slaves. Roman agriculture during
the late Republican period is the most representative of Roman experi-
ence.

By late Republican days, cattle and other domestic animals were
raised in greater numbers and pasturage gained in importance in pro-
portion to the amount of land under active cultivation. The chief cereals
were wheat, barley, and millet. Among the more important vegetables
were beans, lettuce, cabbage, leeks, onions, carrots, asparagus, artichokes,
cucumbers, melons, and peas. Turnips were food for cattle and slaves.
Vineyards provided grapes, raisins, and wine. During the imperial
period olive orchards were especially prized and extensively developed.
Olive oil was a dressing for food and a substitute for our butter; it was
also burned in lamps and used as a lubricant. Figs were grown in
abundance. The Romans did little artificial fertilization of the soil, but
they did practice the rotation of crops, which helped to preserve fertility.
The two-field system was in general use.

The plow was made of wood with an iron point, and it was often neces-
sary to plow back at least once to turn over the furrow. Cross-plowing
was also usual. Even so, men on foot had to pull over some of the sod
with griib hoes. Crude drags and harrows constructed of wooden beams
and iron spikes were used to break up the sod and prepare the soil. The
sowing was done by hand — broadcast. Brush was then dragged over the
ground to help cover the seed or grain. The ripened grain was cut with
sickles and scythes, bound by hand, and drawn in crude ox-carts to the
barns. Here it was threshed with flails, or by sheep and other domestic
animals driven over it. Stone mills, operated by hand or water power,

74 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

ground the grain into flour and meal. There were also presses for making
wine and olive oil.

The seasonal distribution of agricultural operations varied somewhat
as between the northern and southern portions of the peninsula, but
roughly it went about as follows: Wheat was sown in the autumn, when
most of the plowing was done for other crops as well. Threshing was
also cleaned up in the autumn. In the winter the orchards were trimmed.
In the spring the barley and millet were sown and the vegetables planted.
Hay was mown in May and June. Wheat, barley, and millet were
harvested in July. Figs and grapes were picked in August. Figs were
dried, the grapes made into raisins, and the wine pressed mainly during
this month.

Agricultural operations were complicated and delayed by the many
festivals and religious holidays connected with Roman agriculture. In-
deed, the religion of Republican Rome centered about the rites involved
in securing adequate supernatural aid and guidance in agricultural
processes and about the expressions of gratitude to the gods for a success-
ful harvest. There were forty-five such festival days in the Roman
calendar.

Domestic animals were varied and numerous. The many breeds of
horses were used mainly for travel, war, and races rather than for ordi-
nary farm draft purposes. Cattle were raised extensively for milk and
draft purposes more than for beef. Beef was not widely consumed as a
staple meat by the ancient Romans except by the wealthier classes.
Much cheese was made but butter was practically unknown in Roman
times. Hogs were raised in great profusion and pork was the most
popular meat consumed by the Romans, especially by the middle classes.
Sheep were raised for wool and for mutton. Goats were reared for milk
and cheese. Donkeys were bred as beasts of burden. Among the
better-known domestic fowls were hens, peacocks, and doves. Game
birds were grown for the table of the rich. The bee industry was im-
portant since sugar was unknown and honey was the chief sweetening
used in the food and beverages of the time.

Medieval Agriculture. During the Middle Ages agriculture was
carried on according to an interesting communal form of control known
as the manorial system.

With the peasant village inhabited by the serfs as a center, there ex-
tended out and around it the arable or cultivated fields, which could be
reached from the village by lanes wide enough for the passage of carts.
The arable land was divided into three distinct sections, each large field
being subdivided into several smaller plots called shots, and these in
turn divided into seemingly numberless strips of varying lengths. If the
manor was a large one, the village might nestle against the thick outer
walls of the lord's castle. In a smaller one, the lord's manor house, with
the adjoining barn and stable, would be situated on a choice site not far
from, and perhaps facing, the village. Within the same section there
stood a church, the dwelling of the priest, and a small cemetery. Near

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 75

the manor house lay at least a part of the lord's demesne, which was
entirely his own land and usually the best of the farm land on the manor.
Finally, there was the common meadow, woodland, and waste land,
shared by all the village peasantry.

In all, seven different agricultural divisions of land could be discovered
on the typical manor: (1) the lord's demesne, cultivated by special serfs
of the demesne and by the villagers; (2) the lord's close, which was that
part of the demesne rented to free or semiservile cultivators; (3) the
tenures or shares of the villagers, scattered in strips through the three
large arable fields; (4) the meadow land; (5) the woodlands; (6) the
waste land, and (7) the land of the parish priest, either in a compact
area or scattered in strips throughout the fields.

The arable land lay in two or three great open fields — after the close
of the eighth century, usually in three. Each field was divided into strips
ranging from an eighth of a mile to a half-mile in length, separated by
balks of unplowed land. No peasant held two contiguous strips. This
open-field system, so strange in modern eyes, finds its reason for existence,
as well as its explanation, in the sharehold principle. The peasants' arable
land usually did not change hands, but was held by each household in
hereditary possession. Yet, as Vinogradoff points out, only when the
land was planted did the villager possess what we may call separate or
private rights over his particular strips. For after the field had been
harvested, returning to the condition of waste land or pasture land, it
became a common, and thus perpetuated the principle that the common
belonged to the village as a whole. Furthermore, though each house-
hold in the manor had a recognized right to its share of arable land,
which was usually passed on by hereditary succession, still the particular
strips held might not always remain the same from year to year. In
some regions at least, and particularly in the early period, the house-
holders exchanged strips periodically by lot, so that each took his chances
in getting either the better or the less desirable strips.

The three-field system, so characteristic of manorial husbandry, divided
the arable land into three distinct sections. One field was for spring
planting, the second for fall planting, and the third left fallow to recover
its fertility. This was the one great innovation in agriculture made
during the Middle Ages. Both the Germans and the Romans had em-
ployed the two-field system, in which one field was planted and one kept
fallow for recuperation. The discovery, at some time or other, that
wheat or rye could be planted in the fall as well as in the spring made it
possible every year to work two thirds of the available land and to
permit one third to rest and regain its strength, according to the following
rotation in each field: spring planting, autumn planting, fallow. This
remarkable discovery produced two crops each year, made use of two
thirds of the arable land instead of one half, and even reduced the labor
in plowing.

The fall crop, consisting of wheat or rye or both, was sown at the end
of August or early in September and was harvested the following summer.

76 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

Here about two bushels of seed were sown to the acre strip, and the
return was rarely above ten bushels to the acre, indeed a slight one for
the labor involved. The spring plowing and sowing took place in Febru-
ary or March, and the crop was harvested late in the following summer.
Oats, barley, peas, and beans (the last two were more common in the
later centuries, and only rarely was a whole field given over to them)
were sown, and the yield of the first two was usually under fourteen
bushels to the acre on four bushels of seed. Because a knowledge of
artificial fertilization was lacking in most cases, one field, as we have
seen, had to be left fallow so that nature might restore its fertility.

The villagers worked their own strips and those of the lord as well.
The village community as a whole directed and supplied the labor for
all the agricultural processes, including the crops to be planted and the
reclamation of new land. All the manorial land, of both the lord and
the villagers, was thus cultivated by a complex system of joint labor.
Poor implements and the elementary agricultural technique at their com-
mand made the labor of the peasants back-breaking and tedious. The
fact that most of the labor was done in groups or gangs did something,
however, to relieve its wearying monotony.

The plow, a huge, clumsy affair tipped with iron, had to be drawn by
some six to twelve oxen, required two or four men to operate it, and
turned up the soil in a very shallow furrow. Thorn trees weighted with
logs constituted far from adequate harrows. The large lumps of soil
were broken with crude mattocks. There were no grain drills, so the
seed was always sown by hand. Weeding was done by hand or with a
forked stick, a hook, or snippers. Wheat and rye were gleaned with a
sickle — a long and laborious job — and a scythe was used to cut the hay,
barley, oats, peas, and beans. The grain, threshed with a flail or trodden
out by cattle, was later winnowed by being thrown up into the wind.
The last was a task frequently performed by the women and children.
Except for a very rudimentary use of marl and lime, and the informal
manuring of the land when it was used as pasturage, there was no attempt
to produce artificial fertilization.

For farm work oxen were preferred and were used far more than
horses. They were less expensive to keep and less likely to become sick;
their harness was much more simple and their shoeing cheaper; and
finally, when they grew old they could be killed and eaten. While horses
were raised on the manor — especially for military service — their use was
limited. When they were employed for farm work, they were usually
hitched together with the oxen. The lack of scientific breeding and care
of all domesticated animals resulted in rangy cattle, much lighter in
weight and weaker than the sturdy animals of today, and in unimproved
types of sheep and hogs. The cattle were valued for butter, milk, cheese,
and calves. In the thirteenth century a peasant thought about one pound
of butter a week a good return from a cow. Today, ten or twelve pounds
of butter is no unusual production for a cow in one week. The record
cow in American dairying averaged approximately thirty pounds per

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 77

week for a year. At the opening of winter it was customary to slaughter
and salt down many cattle not essential for breeding and draft purposes.

The sheep were valued chiefly for their wool. "Rot" and "scab" were
devastatingly frequent. As late as the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the wool was still partially pulled out and partially cut off with
a knife. Both the cattle and sheep were cared for by the village cowherd
and shepherd, who took them out to pasture in the morning and brought
them back at nightfall. Hogs, like our half-wild Arkansas razorbacks,
ranged the woods for food. Of fowls, chickens, geese, ducks, and pigeons
(only the lord was permitted to breed and keep these last) were common.
Turkey and guinea fowl were unknown at this time. During the Middle
Ages bees enjoyed — as in Roman days — an economic dignity. The wax
was in great demand for seals and candles, and honey was almost the
only form of sweetening available.

The villagers, as we have stated, worked both the demesne farm of the
lord and their own holdings. In return the peasantry owed the lord
certain duties and dues. Besides, from a practical and realistic point of
view, the lords did and could exploit the village communities simply be-
cause they were strong enough to do so. The theory that the peasants
rendered services and dues to the lord in return for protection and the
"privilege of working their lands" is at best no more than a legal ration-
alization of a harsh practical fact.

Beyond these services in labor, the village was obliged to supply the
lord with carefully stipulated amounts, at regular intervals, of grain,
shoes, eggs, wood, wool, honey, poultry, cattle, and so on. The lord also
shifted to his villagers the economic burden of financing his entertain-
ment.

Granted that the lord enjoyed the better part of the bargain, he never-
theless did perform services that were of benefit to his peasants. In the
protection he offered, in the food he frequently distributed in famine
times, in the ovens and mills and bridges he constructed for general use,
and in the superior stock he sometimes kept for breeding purposes, he
offered the peasant definite economic aid.

The medieval monks were the best farmers in western Europe. They
handed down Roman agricultural methods, did heroic work in clearing
forests and waste land for agricultural uses, drained swamps, built roads,
and made some start in introducing crude methods of fertilization of the
soil. In the early Middle Ages, the monks did most of the farming them-
selves, but later on they both employed serfs and hired peasant laborers
extensively, and their technique and system of cultivation did not differ
greatly from the general manorial procedure, save in being usually more
efficient and productive.

The Muslims were even more scientific farmers than the medieval
monks. They cultivated the conventional grain crops very efficiently,
but they were especially famous for their fruits, especially melons,
oranges, dates, figs, apricots, and peaches. They were also noted for
their scientific stock-raising, particularly fine horses and sheep with an

78 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

excellent grade of wool. Muslim agriculture was carried on both on great
estates cultivated by serfs and peasants and on smaller farms worked by
free peasant owners.

The Agricultural Revolution. The next important change in agri-
culture was the so-called Agricultural Revolution of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. This took place mainly in England, though
its achievements were carried to the Continent and to America.

The manorial system had been wiped out in England, so far as methods
of landholding and class differentiation were concerned, by the sixteenth
century, but the technique of agriculture, involving rudimentary tools
and cooperative labor, underwent astonishingly slight changes between
the twelfth century and the close of the seventeenth. In spite of the
disappearance of the legal aspects of the manor and of many of its older
social practices, the agricultural village, strip ownership of land, cooper-
ative cultivation, common pasture, and wood-gathering rights were still
present in 1700.

A series of remarkable changes in technique, with a sweeping reaction
upon the social organization of English agriculture, took place in the
eighteenth century. These were: (1) the introduction of new agricultural
implements; (2) successful experiments with new crops; (3) improve-
ments of stock-breeding; (4) drainage of waste land and the development
of scientific notions of fertilizing the soil; and finally (5) the organization
of scientific and pseudo-scientific societies for the promotion of improved
agricultural technique.

Down to the seventeenth century, almost nothing new had been pro-
vided for working up the ground about the roots of crops that could be
"cultivated" (not grain), and for eliminating weeds. The provision of
better agricultural tools and machinery is associated chiefly with the
work of Jethro Tull (1674-1740). Tull introduced the first successful
modern drill for the sowing of grain. This superseded the old and waste-
ful method of sowing grain broadcast by hand on top of the ground. He
also stimulated (for England) the modern practice of "cultivating,"
namely, working up the soil about the roots of such crops as peas, beans,
beets, turnips, and potatoes, and eliminating the competing weeds. In
the words of R. W. Prothero: "The chief legacies which Jethro Tull left
to his successors were clean farming, economy in seedings, drilling, and the
maxim that the more irons are among the roots the better for the crop."

Lord Townshend (1674r-1738) was mainly responsible for the introduc-
tion of new crops. Down to this time it had been difficult to secure winter
crops, or any that would not considerably reduce the fertility of the land.
This deficiency had made it necessary to leave one third or more of the
ground fallow each year. An associated problem had been to secure
enough fodder to carry the horses, cattle, and sheep safely through the
winter season, because the "hay" was chiefly derived from unproductive
natural grasses.

Townshend solved some of these problems. He introduced, and
rendered important service in promoting the successful cultivation of,

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 79

turnips and artificial grasses, especially clover. Clover does not reduce
fertility as do grains, and it performs important services in gathering
nitrogen, loosening the ground, and counteracting the tendency of many
crops, when repeated, to render the soil unfit to reproduce them until it
has been "rested," as farmers sometimes colloquially put it. The chem-
istry of plant growth and the results of repeated cropping on the same
spot under intensive artificial cultivation are so delicate and complicated
that a judicious change of crops is often as effective in preventing soil
exhaustion as a fallow year would be. After the introduction of clover
and the rotation of crops, the fallow year was gradually abandoned, and
the acreage that might be cropped each year was increased by some
30 per cent or more. At the same time, the appearance of clover made it
possible to produce an adequate supply of hay to carry live-stock through
the winter. Turnips as a new crop also helped greatly in the problem of
getting enough food for cattle. They were also used as food by peasants.
So great was Lord Townshend's enthusiasm for turnips that he was
dubbed "Turnip Townshend."

A revolutionary development of stock-breeding was very largely the
result of the efforts of Robert Bakewell (1725-1795). Specialized breeds
that would bring the highest market prices as beef, mutton, and pork had
been impossible under manorial conditions. The cultivators had used
common pasture lands, so that all the stock ran together, breeding down
to a common mongrel type. Something had been done in stock-breeding
by monasteries and lay lords who had inclosed fields, but the shortage of
hay for wintering tended to throw emphasis on hardihood rather than on
quality from the consumer's point of view. Some progress had already
been made in the Netherlands, where the manor had disappeared early
or never existed at all, and imported stock from the Mediterranean re-
gion had improved the breeds, particularly of cattle, horses, and sheep.
In England, however, as in northern Europe, it was usual to find a single
type of horse, cow, sheep, or hog, not specialized, respectively, to road
or draft use, milk or beef, mutton or wool, or the best type of pork.

Bakewell understood that no one type of animal could be adapted to
all the various purposes. Therefore, he started to breed specialized
horses for draft and for road use, to create distinctive breeds of cattle for
beef or milk, and to separate his wool sheep from his mutton sheep. He
was opposed to allowing others to imitate his methods or appropriate his
secrets, but his improvements in stock-breeding were more rapidly
accepted than the innovations of Tull and Townshend in their respective
fields. The Duke of Bedford (1765-1802) and Lord Somerville (1765-
1819) carried on and popularized scientific stock-breeding.

Arthur Young (1741-1820) made a contribution of a different sort.
He was familiar with the work of Tull, Townshend, and B.akewell, and
desired to see their innovations generally adopted. He understood, how-
ever, that this would not be possible so long as England was divided into
many small holdings, worked according to the anachronistic cooperative
methods inherited from the manorial regime, and without capital Adequate

80 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

to finance large-scale farming. His professional life was devoted mainly
to the reforms that were necessary to realize his aspirations. He was
the great prophet and agitator, urging on the most characteristic agrarian
transformation of his time in England — the development of the enclosure
or engrossing of land. The consolidation of small holdings into larger
farms displaced the English yeomanry and produced modern capitalistic
farming between 1760 and 1830.

Further technical advances were made in draining land, mixing soils,
and fertilization. The desirability of mixing soils was emphasized by
Lord Townshend and carried on by Thomas Coke and other early capi-
talistic farmers. Scientific fertilization of soils was made possible by
the remarkable advances in chemistry in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Perhaps the first important chemist to devote his attention
to land fertilization was Sir Humphry Davy. His work was carried on
by, among others, the greatest organic chemist of his age, the German
scientist, Justus von Liebig. Chemistry enabled experts to determine just
what chemicals were needed in any particular soil to insure maximum
fertility and also made it possible to produce these substances more
surely, speedily, and cheaply. Agricultural societies were organized to
aid in carrying on effectively all of these progressive farming methods.
Such were the famous Smithfield Club of London and the Highland
Society in Scotland.

The rapidity with which the reforms were actually carried out was
due to the Commercial Revolution and its results. Merchants had
greatly increased in numbers and in wealth, but social prestige was still
hard to achieve without membership in the landholding class. Many
who had become rich in commerce were thus glad to invest their money
in great landed estates as the one open door to political and social influ-
ence. Not altogether by accident, the technical improvements in agri-
culture added the possibility of profits to the social and political incen-
tives for building up the great estates that characterized English
agriculture throughout the nineteenth century. Also, the higher agri-
cultural prices that prevailed during the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars encouraged capitalistic farming. The large landhold-
ing& were created chiefly by purchasing land held earlier by the squires
and tenant farmers, and by ousting peasants from their leaseholds and
customs holds.

Though these agricultural transformations as a whole increased agri-
cultural efficiency and production, they brought about the wholesale
depression of the great mass of the residents in the country. N. S. B.
Gras writes:

To many students of our day, the most significant result of the agricultural
revolution was not economic efficiency, not change in land tenure, and not
literary culture, but the loss of well-being by the rank and file of country people.
The proletarianizing of the yeomen and the customary tenants seems a great
social set-back. Where they had been masters, they now became laborers, at
least in many instances. And then the cottars and squatters, the traditional

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 81

poor and laboring class of the village, suffered greatly when their holdings were
enclosed for the new agriculture. They lost their cows, pigs, and geese when
the commons were enclosed, and instead of milk, pork, and fowl, they lived on
bread and tea. They lost their fuel when the waste land was enclosed; and if
they wanted to keep warm, they were invited to use the stables. Truly it was
but slight compensation for such losses to have plenty of work offered to them
and to be compelled to accept it to keep body and soul together. Industrial
discipline is one of our modern acquisitions, but the price in this case and
commonly is a very heavy one. The usual escape from this sad dilemma is
to regard the economic gain as permanent and the human suffering as tem-
porary. But the unescapable reflection is that the sufferers have but one life
to live, and when that is gone, civilization is gone — for them. They have helped
to furnish the elegant home of the gentleman farmer and they have submitted
to the new discipline. They have built the poet's palace of art but they dwell
not in it.4

The ruination of the free peasantry was a major cause of the decline
of Roman society. The coming of the Industrial Revolution after 1750,
however, and the employment of many of the landless in factories, lessened
the immediate social penalty of dispossessing the English masses of their
land.

The agricultural changes, like those in industry and commerce, were
not without a close relation to the Industrial Revolution. The new capi-
talistic farming, for the time being at least, increased the productivity
of English agriculture and made it possible to maintain the greatly in-
creased urban population. Further, the great mass of peasants were
glad to take up employment on the large estates or in the new factory
towns at even pitifully inadequate wages and under the most exacting
conditions of labor. In this way a cheap and eager industrial proletariat
was provided for the new factory towns that were created as a result of
the inventive genius of Hargreaves, Crompton, and Watt, and the organ-
izing genius of Arkwright. From the dispossessed agricultural laborers
there was created a "free" labor market to facilitate the rapid expansion
of nascent industrialism.

The Mechanization of Agriculture. The most important recent
changes in agriculture are those related to mechanization and the applica-
tion of chemistry and other forms of science to agricultural production.
This transformation of agriculture has been most striking in the United
States.

The colonists brought from England and other parts of Europe the
plow, the cultivator, and other rudimentary agricultural machinery.
There were few further mechanical improvements in agriculture until
the nineteenth century. In the first half of that century, Thomas Jeffer-
son and others devised better types of iron and steel plows. A workable
seed drill was invented, better harrows, and a mechanical mowing ma-
chine. Perhaps the most momentous invention of this period was that of
Obed Hussey and Cyrus H. McCormick, who produced the mechanical

4 N. S. B. Gras, History of Agriculture in Europe and America, Crofts, 1940, 2nd ed.,
p. 328.

82 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

reaper between 1833 and 1845. Crude threshing machines, usually oper-
ated by horse power, appeared about the middle of the century.

From the Civil War onward agricultural inventions became more
numerous and impressive. The grain binder (self-binder), invented in
the 'seventies, was at first rather crude and bound the grain with wire.
In the 'seventies and 'eighties John F. Appleby and William Deering in-
vented the improved twine binder. At the end of the century the me-
chanical header was introduced and greatly hastened the harvesting
process in areas where it was not thought worth while to preserve the
straw from the wheat stalk. The steam threshing machine worked a
revolution in the separation of grain from the husk. At the turn of the
century the corn harvester and the corn husker completely transformed
the handling of the corn crop. It is estimated that the mechanical
inventions of the nineteenth century brought about a saving of 79 per
cent in farm labor and cut down farming costs by over 46 per cent.

But the most sweeping and unsettling advances in agricultural ma-
chinery were still to come. The improvement of the internal combustion
engine made possible an economical and successful farm tractor, first
introduced by Benjamin Holt in 1903. This and the automobile truck
tended to displace the horse, mule, and ox in agricultural processes.
Along with the tractor, the ever more effective gang-plow and the disc-
harrow combine revolutionized the preparation of soil for the sowing of
crops. Larger grain drills, tractor-drawn in veritable fleets, greatly
hastened the sowing. Airplanes are beginning to be used for the sowing
of rice and of wheat with an impressive efficiency.

The harvesting of grain was equally facilitated by the harvesting com-
bine, which cuts, threshes, cleans, and bags grain, all in one process.
The product per worker in grain agriculture has been incredibly increased
in comparison with the old days of the horse plow and the horse-drawn
binder. The cotton-picker, invented by the Rust brothers, may produce
a comparable revolution in Southern agriculture. The increase of effi-
ciency brought about as a result of mechanized farming, as well as the
wide divergence of the new from the old methods of cultivation, is well
brought out by Morrow Mayo:

Technically, the machine has revolutionized wheat farming fully as much as
it has revolutionized automobile production. In 1900 it required three hours
of labor to produce a bushel of wheat; today it requires three minutes of
machine time. Under horse conditions 500 acres was about all the land that a
wheat fanner could handle. He could plow only from two to four acres a day.
Even with a six-horse drill he could plant only eighteen or twenty acres a day.
Today with a small tractor he plows fifty acres a day and drills fifty acres a
day. With a tractor and combine two men can cut and thresh fifty acres of
wheat in ten hours — an operation that but a few years ago required twenty-three
men the same number of hours. The machine has reduced 10,000 acres of wheat
land to the size of 500 acres, and 500 acres to the size of 20 acres. . . .

Corporation wheat farming is a first step in that direction (economical pro-
duction). Here is the way they do it. The land is divided into blocks of from
5,000 to 10,000 acres. Each block is under a foreman, who has charge of the
labor, and the machinery when it is on his unit. He is responsible to the pro-

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 83

duction manager. A transportation outfit shifts equipment wherever it is needed.
The Wheat Farm Corporation of Kansas City, which operates 75,000 acres, uses
forty caterpillar tractors, a fleet of trucks, thirty combines, and hundreds of
tillage machines, with an aggregate value of $250,000. Laborers (i.e., farmers)
are employed when needed, about sixty or ninety days a year. They work eight
hours a day, and punch time-clocks on their tractors. At certain seasons the
work is carried on twenty-four hours a day, with the laborers working in three
eight-hour shifts and operating tractors equipped with search-lights at night.5

When one reflects that nearly one half of our domestic wheat today is
produced by tenant farmers on a sharecropping basis, with nothing like
the same mechanization which prevails on the big corporate farms, it is
easy to realize how far we are from exploiting all the advantages of
mechanized efficiency. We can begin to understand what tremendous
changes are bound to take place in cereal farming areas if all possible
mechanical efficiency is ever fully attained and we begin to produce grain
for human use in an economy of plenty.

The contributions of chemistry to greater agricultural efficiency have
also been notable. The mechanical inventions and better fertilization
have created a potential agricultural production in the United States
which seems almost incredible, even to scientific students of the problem.
0. W. Willcox has made it clear, in his Reshaping Agriculture and Nations
Can Live at Home, that we could produce all the food needed for a high
standard of living with one fifth of the number of persons now employed
in agriculture, working only one fifth of the land now under cultivation.
The import of all this for the future of the American farm and rural com-
munity is too momentous for even the most astute economist or sociologist
to discern today or to forecast with accuracy.

Moreover, we are on the eve of remarkable achievements in the field
of synthetic chemistry. These will insure a better utilization of farm
products and will also create foods artificially by purely chemical
methods. The stages in the application of chemistry to agriculture have
been thus summarized by Wayne W. Parrish and Harold F. Clark:

1. Primitive stage, still practiced over wide areas of the earth, in which seeds
are planted in straight rows in the soil and the whole business is left to nature.
A little fertilization is used but most unscientifically.

2. Intensive stage, gradually coming into use, in which large quantities of syn-
thetically produced fertilizers are applied to the soil to reap enormous yields.
This stage is so perfected that it is known with precision that a specified quantity
of the organic chemical matter will yield a specified quantity of crop.

3. Control stage, which eliminates the soil as being unnecessary to plant growth.
Plants are grown in a solution of necessary organic substances in trays or cabi-
nets, with a new crop every few weeks. This stage takes agriculture off the farm
into factories or kitchens and places it under strict man-made control.

4. Synthetic stage, in which the chemist transfers the whole agricultural enter-
prise to the factory, eliminating seeds, plant, sun, soil, winds, and rain. He finds
out wheat a plant is made of, duplicates or imitates it, and provides unlimited
production of uniform produce by automatic processes. . . .

5 "Goodbye Wheat Farmer," in The American Mercury, June, 1931, p. 193.

84 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

Virtually all foods, from wheat and corn to beans, can be made in the labora-
tory. The problem was merely to break down the natural food into its chemical
constituents and rebuild these constituents into new food forms. While this is
not strictly a synthetic process, it at least transfers the making of foods from
the farm to the factory. One of the outstanding achievements to date has been
the manufacture of butter substitutes.6

The recent agricultural advances have completely upset the theories
of Malthus, to the effect that population growth was bound to crowd
hard on the heels of food production. In the twentieth century, popula-
tion has notably slowed down while potential food production has in-
creased at a most impressive rate. These inventions have also altered
some of the main problems of the farmer. In the old days his chief
ambition was to get a good crop, which he could easily sell. Today the
problem is often how to dispose of a crop profitably, once it is harvested.
Machinery, fertilization, irrigation, and insecticides have reduced the
tyranny and vicissitudes of nature ; but new worries, in the form of agri-
cultural surpluses, have arisen.

Agricultural surpluses are not alone due to better technological methods
of production. They also grow out of more efficient modes of preserving
and transporting food. The canning industry has been improved, but
even more revolutionary have been the use of refrigerator cars and the
construction of cold storage plants. Electric and gas refrigeration units
have increased the popularity of refrigerators in private homes. This
means that less and less food is wasted through spoiling and decay. So-
called dry ice as a type of super-refrigeration and the associated method
of refrigeration employed in the Birdseye and other frozen food products
make possible almost indefinite preservation of food, with little loss of
the original taste and savor.

Agricultural Changes Since the First World War. The first World
War created a special need for food production at home, on account of
the British blockade of the Continent and the German submarine warfare
directed against French and English shipping. Considerable land that
had hitherto been waste land, pasture land, hunting land, or concentrated
in the estates of the nobility was brought under cultivation. Improved
agricultural methods were also introduced.

After the war there were sweeping land reforms. In Soviet Russia
the land was gradually nationalized, collective and state farms estab-
lished, and agriculture was mechanized with a speed and thoroughness
unmatched in previous human experience.

In the Balkan states and in the newly-created states of Poland, Czecho-
slovakia, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, there were notable
agrarian reforms, consisting mainly of the redistribution of great estates,
formerly held by the nobility, among the peasants. The Tory landlords
in England, the feudal landlords in Hungary, and the Junkers in Prussia

6 Parrish and Clark, "Chemistry Wrecks the Farm," Harper's Magazine, August,
1935, pp. 274-275, 278.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 85

were able to resist the movement for agrarian reform until the coming
of the second World War.

The second World War once more created a food crisis. Germany,
in control of much of continental Europe outside of Soviet Russia, and
prevented by the British blockade from getting food overseas, made a
frantic effort to get enough food supplies by intensive cultivation of
European lands. In so doing she made much use of forced labor on the
part of conquered populations and armies. The prospect was that the
land would be nationalized and agriculture mechanized by the Nazis
almost as thoroughly as in Soviet Russia.

In the United States, despite a so-called surplus of agricultural pro-
duction, at no time have the masses been able to buy enough food to enjoy
decent living standards. Even in 1928 and 1929, only 10 per cent of the
population could afford to buy enough to eat, according to government
standards of a liberal diet suitable for our citizens.

But we have been able to produce far more than the people can buy
under a scarcity economy and the profit system of agricultural enter-
prise. The condition of the American farmers grew progressively worse
from 1920 to 1933. The New Deal had to tackle the farm problem reso-
lutely but its policy has been that of subsidizing agricultural scarcity and
curtailed production, while the masses of the people still continue to have
too little to eat. This is obviously no solution of the farm problem, and
many believe that it cannot be solved short of a system of cooperative
and state-controlled agriculture which will produce for human use rather
than for private profits.

Outstanding Trends in the Evolution of
Manufacturing

Industry in Primitive Times. Like those of most other phases of
human culture, the foundations of manufacturing industry were laid in
the so-called prehistoric or pre-literary period.

The most important contribution of the pre-literary period to human
material culture lay in the origins of tools, which made the conquest of
nature by man more efficient than would have been possible by his
unaided hands. To a considerable degree, the measure of human progress
lies in the progressive development of tools. The first tools, we may say,
were the products not of thought but of accident. Man's tools were
discovered before they were invented.

Wood, bone, shell, skin, and the like were employed as tools by early
man, in addition to stone — that is, he used all these objects as means to
secure the desired ends. Implements fashioned of stone are generally
the ones that enable us to measure early industrial development. The
fact that the stone implements and weapons of pre-literary man changed .
and improved in many ways permits us to distinguish successive stages
in his industrial progress.

In the Eolithic period, man found his tools "ready-made." The re^

86 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

mainder of the Stone Age is broken up, as we have seen, into the Paleo-
lithic and Neolithic periods, classified according to changes in the type,
variety, and fineness of workmanship of the stone tools and weapons
manufactured. From then on, man made his own tools instead of de-
pending upon crude aids provided by nature.

Paleolithic man also began the manufacture of clothing to keep himself
warm. Equipped as he was with scraper, knife, awl, and bone needle,
late Paleolithic man cut and sewed the skins of animals to provide crude
clothing for himself and his fellow creatures.

Probably the most striking and far-reaching innovation in the Paleo-
lithic period, with the exception of the basic stone industry, was the
method of making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood. There is
good reason to believe that fire was thus artificially produced as early as
the middle of the Paleolithic period, and it seems certain that fire was used
by man long before he became its real master.

For early man fire meant light, heat, protection, and a multitude of
other things. That which once warmed the bodies of primitive man in
the Paleolithic rock shelters now reduces to molten form the iron ore in
the blast furnaces of today, and in the acetylene torch it cuts steel plates
as though they were plywood.

A. L. Kroeber admirably summarizes the achievements of the Paleo-
lithic Age, also indicating what still remained to be done in the way of
creating the foundations of human civilization in the subsequent Neo-
lithic period:

The end of the Paleolithic thus sees man in possession of a number of mechani-
cal arts which enable him to produce a considerable variety of tools in several
materials: sees him controlling fire; cooking food, wearing clothes, and living in
definite habitations; probably possessing some sort of social grouping, order,
and ideas of law and justice; clearly under the influence of some kind of religion;
highly advanced in the plastic arts; and presumably already narrating legends
and singing songs. In short, many fundamental elements of civilization were
established. It is true that the sum total of knowledge and accomplishments
was still pitifully small. The most advanced of the Old Stone Age men perhaps
knew and could do about one thing for every hundred that we know and can do.
A whole array of fundamental inventions — the bow and arrow, pottery, domesti-
cation of animals and plants — had not yet been attempted, and they do not
appear on the scene until the Neolithic. But in spite of the enormous gaps
remaining to be rilled in the Neolithic and in the historic period, it does seem
fair to say that many of the outlines of what civilization was ultimately to be had
been substantially blocked out during the Upper Paleolithic. Most of the frame-
work was there, even though but a small fraction of its content had yet been
entered.7

Remarkable industrial progress was made during the Neolithic Age.
Earlier types of implements and weapons were improved, and new ones
were invented. The bow-and-arrow and the large stone axe originated
in the early Neolithic. By the close of the period the latter had come
to be ground, and perforated to receive a handle. In the early Neo-

T A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology, Harcourt, Brace, 1934, pp. 178-179,

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 87

lithic there was also a marked improvement in the work on horn and
bone. The beauty of the design and workmanship evident in the late
Neolithic stone implements, particularly the knives, made them works of
art as well as tools. One more significant stone implement made its
appearance: the stone mill for grinding corn.

Almost as important as the domestication of animals and agriculture
was the beginning of spinning and weaving in the Neolithic period.
Earlier, man made his clothing of animal skins, using beaten-bark string
as thread. Now he began to wear woven clothing, for which flax was
the chief fiber material used. Man at first twisted the fibers by rubbing
them on his thigh or leg. Later a weight was attached to one end of a
stick. The spindle-whorl thus evolved ; the yarn could be spun by twist-
ing the spindle to which the fiber was attached. The weight prevented
the thread from untwisting or curling. It seems that the spindle-whorl
answered admirably at the time, for there was only a slight advance in
this technique of spinning until the spinning-wheel was devised some time
during the Middle Ages. In some backward regions the spindle-whorl
is still used.

The first suggestions of weaving appeared in the wattle-work roofs of
the pit dwellings, and the next step came in basketry and matting. By
the Neolithic period, cloth was woven on the hand loom, which was finally
supplanted only in the first quarter of the nineteenth century of the
Christian era. As Professor Breasted points out, the technique of spin-
ning and weaving linen cloth in the late Neolithic period in Egypt was in
most respects equal to any workmanship exhibited prior to the Industrial
Revolution and the age of mechanical weaving.

For the introduction of pottery, Neolithic man also deserves credit.
Hollowed chalk vessels were the only rude traces of pottery in the Paleo-
lithic period. How man discovered pottery we can only guess. But it
was indeed a stroke of good fortune when he learned that some kinds of
earth could be molded and dried to retain a given shape, and could also
be baked and thus made durable and waterproof. The invention of pot-
tery meant that man could pick his habitation more freely, because the
all-necessary water could now be transported over a distance. It opened
up new possibilities in cooking, and also brought art into the home. Pot-
tery was still hand-shaped in the Neolithic; the potter's wheel did not
appear until the metal ages. Kiln-baking was likewise a thing of the
future.

Manufacturing in the Ancient Near Orient. In the field of tech-
nology and manufacturing, the progress made by the ancient Near
Orient was striking and diversified. The Stone Age came to an end,
except for stone knives used by the priests for ceremonial purposes. The
metal ages began at this time and before the close of the oriental period
man had accustomed himself to the manufacture of most of the well-
known metals we now utilize, with the exception of aluminum and alloys.
Copper was the first metal to be worked. It seems that the Egyptians
first invented the art of metal working, as we find some copper needles in

88 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

the Egyptian tombs constructed earlier than 4000 B.C., and copper chisels
in considerable quantities in graves of around 3500 B.C.

A harder and tougher metal appeared with the rise of bronze imple-
ments and weapons, about 2500 B.C., on the islands of the Aegean. The
first bronze appears to have been manufactured from an ore in which
copper and the essential tin existed in a natural mixture. Shortly after
this time, man mastered the process of manufacturing bronze by mixing
tin and other metals with the copper ore.

Though there is some evidence of an early iron culture in Africa, it is
still generally held that the manufacture of iron implements and weapons
originated with the Hittites of Asia Minor, sometime around the four-
teenth century B.C. Excellent steel was manufactured in Syria and else-
where before the close of the oriental period.

The working of the precious metals was also begun in oriental times.
The Egyptians executed the most elaborate forms in gold, and the Baby-
lonians specialized in various kinds of silver ornaments. Likewise, com-
petent work on precious stones made its appearance in this antique age.

The potter's wheel was first used in the oriental period, and glazed pot-
tery began to be manufactured. Designs became more ingenious and
artistic and the ornamentation much more beautiful. The potter's wheel
was the forerunner of the all-important lathe, about the most complicated
mechanism that the ancient world produced. It also suggested the drill,
which was used by the Egyptian jewelers.

The textile industry expanded rapidly. Finer cloth was demanded and
quickly produced. The weaving of tapestry began at this time. The
Egyptians excelled in the production of many types of linen cloth, while
the Babylonians carried the manufacturing of woolens and worsteds to a
high degree of technical perfection. Clothing began to be artificially
dyed in a variety of colors.

The improved technology brought about a marked increase in the
volume of manufactured commodities. Better transportation resulted
from the domestication of the donkey, horse, and camel. Improved
roads made it feasible to travel farther in search of raw materials and
facilitated the shipment of manufactured products. There was special-
ization by trades, which made for better quality and increased produc-
tivity in manufacture. Likewise, in Babylonia we find the first appear-
ance of factories or shops, usually located in the temples, which made
possible a more efficient supervision of industry than could be achieved
with scattered labor in individual homes. All along the line there were
notable improvements in the variety and technique of manufacturing.

Greek and Roman Manufacturing. In spite of their remarkable
contributions to culture, the Greeks were far inferior to the peoples of the
Near Orient in their industrial activities. The Greeks did not distin-
guish between the crafts and the professions as we do. The worker in
metal, the sculptor, and the doctor were all "craftsmen." They were all,
in theory at least, of the same social and economic rank. The method
of instruction, whether in painting or in cobbling, was by apprenticeship.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 89

Even before Pericles there was specialization in industry, and there was
specialization within some of the crafts themselves. Sandals, for ex-
ample, were not usually cut and sewed by the same craftsman. There
was a similar division of processes in the manufacture of pottery. The
work was done by hand with the aid of fairly simple tools. Most of the
Greek craftsmen were free metics (people of foreign birth) and slaves.
Some, however, were drawn from the class of free citizens.

One of the largest Athenian establishments produced shields and em-
ployed 120 men, but a shop with twenty men was considered rather large.
Most craftsmen worked in their homes or in small establishments. They
retained their status as private craftsmen when they labored for the state.
The free craftsmen were in no sense servants of the state. The chief
reasons for the absence of large-scale industrial organization were the
continued importance of work in the home and the cheapness of slave
labor. Domestic craftsmen were aided by the members of their family
and worked side by side with the slaves. The craftsman usually limited
his output to his own needs and actual orders received. Xenophon tells
us that the Athenian workman was not interested in increasing the num-
ber of his employees, since his production was limited by a definite market
and he knew exactly how many employees he needed. There was some
production, however, for a hypothetical general market. The shoemaker,
for instance, produced a number of ready-made shoes.

Though industry, as well as commerce, ran well behind agri-culture in
economic importance in ancient Rome, the limited evidence we possess
indicates considerable industrial development between the third century
B.C. and the rule of Augustus. The growth of the population of Rome
and other urban communities increased the demand for manufactured
goods and, despite heavy imports, stimulated industry. War needs en-
couraged shipbuilding and metal-working, while the reconstruction of
Rome in the last years of the Republic must have caused considerable
activity in the building trades. The tendency toward specialization in
industry in urban centers was progressing rapidly, even though many
needs in the rural districts were still supplied by domestic manufacture
on the part of the family. On the largest estates, most of the necessities
were provided for by the labor of slaves.

The chief industries of Italy appear to have included the manufacture
of pottery, textiles, metal ware, leather goods, and articles of wood. The
metal mines, both in the peninsula and in Spain and Gaul, were exten-
sively worked. Several cities, such as Capua, Gales, and Puteoli, became
notable for their production of metal goods. Puteoli, with its busy iron
works, was most important, while Capua was a center for copper and
bronze manufacture. Puteoli was also notable for its extensive pottery
works. Rome was a manufacturing center for bricks, pottery, tiles, and
articles made from precious metals. The great number of goldsmiths
and jewelers in that city was indicative of a growing class of wealthy
people and of luxurious tastes. Our knowledge of the textile industries
is rather scanty, but it seems that spinning and weaving, characteristi-

90 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

cally domestic tasks, were becoming specialized occupations or were
done by the slaves in the wealthier families.

Small-scale organization and the simplest of mechanical devices were
typical of Roman industry. Large-scale production and organization
were to be found only in such industries as pottery and brick-making.
Some comparatively large workshops were established by wealthy
Romans, in which a goodly number of slaves were employed under the
management of a freedman or a slave. Many smaller shops were simi-
larly organized, of several types. The free craftsman working with his
family and one or two slaves was common, as were the shops started by
freedmen on borrowed money. The ready availability of cheap labor,
slave and free, discouraged interest in mechanical invention and labor-
saving devices.

Medieval Industry. In the early Middle Ages, two forms of indus-
trial production generally prevailed — domestic and manorial. In the
first, also known as house industry, the family within its own household
produced, so far as possible, all the necessaries of life for its own uses. In
manorial industry, manufactured goods were produced by workers on the
manor, who were attached to their work as the villeins were bound to the
soil. Likewise, they rendered dues and rents, not in agricultural pro-
duce, but in work on manufactured articles. Residing within the town
proper or in its suburbs, there existed what we may call an embryonic
class of urban artisans, who too were under the dominion of lay or
eccelsiastical lords. As a rule, most of the goods produced by domestic
and manorial industry were destined for local consumption, and the
variety of goods was narrow. Yet historians have lately proved that
in the larger towns there was considerable manufacturing, some of it for
a luxury trade.

During and after the eleventh century, the revival of commerce pro-
vided three stimuli that had hitherto been lacking — broader markets, raw
materials, and capital. The contact with the Near East not only intro-
duced new articles into western Europe, but also brought in the more
advanced industrial technique and organization of the Muslims and
Byzantines. Before long, Europe learned not only to reproduce the arti-
cled of the East but also to improve at times upon the borrowed tech-
nique.

The characteristic urban industrial establishment was the small work-
shop of the free artisan — the gild master. He was, apart from the restric-
tions that encircled him, a small entrepreneur. He provided the tools,
frequently the raw materials, always the labor — his own, and that of his
family and apprentices and journeymen — and finally disposed of the
completed article. Since he was, in part, a merchant, it is understandable
why the merchant gild at first included craftsmen.

As the artisan worked on the orders of individual customers or produced
for the town or regional market, he rarely ran the risk of overproduction.
Though his gain was circumscribed, he alone enjoyed the income from
his labor. The element of profit entered, however, where hired workers

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 91

were involved. There the master craftsman received a return also on
their labor.

An incentive to produce goods of high quality lay in the fact that
he sold directly to the consumer. It was thus difficult to escape personal
responsibility for articles of poor quality. The gilds regulated the
hours and conditions of labor in the effort to maintain uniform stand-
ards of excellence. As a rule, the artisan had a long working-day, run-
ning from eight and a half to as many as sixteen hours in some trades
during the summer. But he was forbidden to work at night principally
because the poor artificial light at his disposal made it almost impossible
to do good work after dark. The gild craftsman was enjoined to do his
work before his shop window, where he could be plainly seen by the public.
The fact that all the members of a craft lived in the same street or quarter
of a town facilitated inspection of working conditions and manufactured
products, and enhanced the sense of corporate unity among the gild
members.

Despite the many regulations by the gilds, the standards of excellence
were not always maintained as well as is often supposed. Contemporary
records show the types of fraud practiced. Material supplied by cus-
tomers was sometimes cunningly stolen from under their very noses ; pots
melted when placed on the fire; cloth was stretched; inferior goods were
substituted for those of better quality after the sale had been made.
"Falsework" was punished — first offenses by a fine, which the gild and
the town divided. Third or fourth offenses might draw expulsion from
the gild.

The craft gilds also regulated the remuneration of apprentices and
journeymen. The latter were the true wage-earners, although the for-
mer sometimes received wages towards the close of their training period.
The regulation of wages was made to equalize conditions and destroy
competition among gild members. Prices were fixed on the assumption
that all members of a gild possessed about the same skill. When a great
variety of goods with a diversity of grades began to be manufactured, the
success of price regulation became uncertain, for it depended upon the
uniformity of the goods being produced. To check both variety and
diversity, all the gilds discouraged technical improvements. A change
in tools, material, or method would destroy the principle of gild equality
as well as the uniformity of the type and grade of product. Innovations
did creep in, regardless of prohibitions, and complete equality and uni-
formity was lost with the resulting breakdown in the rigid control of
prices.

AVhile agriculture was the main activity carried on by the monks,
nevertheless they fostered an extensive development of the ordinary medi-
eval industries, and were surpassed in production only by the gilds. Most
of this manufacturing activity was carried on by serfs. This servile labor
greatly reduced manufacturing costs. The monks therefore could com-
pete to great advantage with the free and better-paid gild labor. Hence
the gilds endeavored to protect themselves by anti-cleric economic legis-

92 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

lation in the medieval towns. The monks, however, continued to manu-
facture utensils, clothing, leather goods, and so on. They were noted for
the high quality of their beer, and had a virtual monopoly on beer-brew-
ing until well along in the twelfth century. Their industrial organization
attained such efficiency that they might be described as forerunners of
our modern division of labor. Among the monastic serfs were smiths,
masons, carpenters, carders and weavers, millers and bakers, and skilled
workers In precious metals.

The Muslims were far more advanced than the Christians of western
Europe hi their manufacturing industry. They turned out goods unique
for their day in both variety and volume. According to Charles Seig-
nobos, the West owes to the Muslims "the greater part of our manufac-
tured articles of luxury — linen, damask, morocco, silk stuffs embossed
with gold and silver, muslin, gauze, taffeta, velvet (later brought to such
perfection in Italy), crystal and plate glass imitated in Venice, paper,
sugar, confectionery, and syrups."

Early Modern Industry. Industrial developments following the ex-
pansion of Europe and the Commercial Revolution after 1500 were more
impressive than any others which had taken place since the industrial
developments in ancient Egypt and Babylonia.

The new oversea markets called for increased quantities of European
manufactured products, and the governments, particularly England,
stressed the production of those to be exchanged for raw materials. No
doubt the flow of goods was checked somewhat by monopoly and Mer-
cantilism,8 but the increased production was, nevertheless, unprecedented.

The textile industry was one of the first to be profoundly affected by
the new demand for goods. The manufacture of woolens had been highly
developed in Flanders in the Middle Ages and had been introduced into
England after the middle of the fourteenth century. The silk industry
had also grown to some proportions in Italy and France, and to a lesser
degree in England. Not only was silk manufactured, but raw silk was
successfully produced in both Italy and France.

Most of the oversea demand for European textiles came from colonists.
Among the old, established industries to profit by the new situation were
English woolens and French silks. The fact that some of this textile
trade was with tropical or subtropical regions led in time to a remarkable
development of the cotton trade, in spite of the opposition of the vested
interests in the woolen and silk industries. As early as the latter half
of the sixteenth century, the English began to manufacture for export to
the Indies a coarse cloth known as fustian. At the outset, it was prob-
ably not cotton, certainly not all cotton, but it soon became a mixture in
which cotton figured more and more as the importation of raw cotton in-
creased. A considerable cotton industry also developed in the manu-
facturing of calico, chintz, and underclothing, but the woolen interests
effectively restrained the full expansion of the new rival for a long period.

8 See below, p. 110.

PHASES QF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 93

Cotton began to dominate English textile industry only after the onset
of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. As the ancient
traditions, craft skill, and the vested interests of the workers in the woolen
industry offered much greater resistance to technological changes, English
production of a rough, staple cotton cloth was of great importance in
facilitating the later introduction of textile machinery.

The revolution in dyestuffs improved the quality as well as increased
the quantity of English colored fabrics. The most important of these
new vegetable dyes from overseas were indigo, logwood, and cochineal.
The wide use of pottery in Europe came mainly from the contact of
Europeans with China. During the Middle Ages dishes had been made
of wood, pewter, or brass. The Europeans now began to manufacture
imitations of the Chinese goods, and such well-known products as Meissen
and Delft ware were beginning to be made.

Various types of glass products and glazed ware were produced in
Europe on a considerable scale from the seventeenth century onward.
During the Middle Ages there had been little use of glass, except for
windows in the dwellings of the rich and the notable development of
stained glass for cathedral windows. The glass industry in the Orient
had been important since the days- of the ancient Egyptians, and Euro-
pean contacts with the East led to the large-scale introduction of glass
and glazed products. Not only did the expansion of Europe encourage
the use of glass and glazing for such purposes as windows and dishes, but
also increased the use of spectacles, burning glasses, mirrors, and other
devices brought forth as a result of the progress in the science of optics.

The leather industry increased to a marked degree, particularly notable
being the enormous colonial demand for shoes. In the year 1658 no less
than 24,000 pairs of shoes were sent to Virginia alone.

There was a large market for various types of hardware in the colonies,
particularly for muskets, swords, hoes, nails, various types of tools, lead,
pewter, and tinware. The development of the hardware industry in turn
stimulated mining, particularly the mining of iron, lead, and tin.

Shipbuilding was immediately affected by the new commerce. The
improvement in the construction of vessels had been one of the most
important influences making possible oversea expansion. Progress in
physics and mathematics made it possible to apply scientific rules in the
technique of navigation, which tended to keep pace with the demand for
more and better vessels. In 1560 the total tonnage of English merchant
ships was 7,600. By 1691 it had increased to 500,000. This was accom-
panied by a remarkable growth in the tonnage of war vessels. The Eng-
lish naval tonnage in 1607 was 23,000, while a century later it reached
over 120,000.

Much of this new industry was carried on in the homes of workmen
under the so-called putting-out system, which replaced the gild system of
the Middle Ages.9

9 See below, p. 105.

94 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

The First Industrial Revolution. The most sweeping changes that
ever took place in manufacturing industry were those launched by the
"Industrial Revolution," which began in England in the first half of the
eighteenth century. While there had been considerable mechanical in-
vention from the close of the Middle Ages, machine manufacturing did
not become general until after the Industrial Revolution.

The first important mechanical changes came in the manufacture of
cloth, an industry in which England led the world. Before cotton and
wool can be made into cloth, the fibers must be spun into threads. The
medieval spinning wheel, which spun one thread at a time and was run
by foot power, was still in use everywhere until after the middle of the
eighteenth century. In 1764, James Hargreaves, an English weaver,
succeeded in making a "spinning jenny," which was run by horsepower
and spun eight threads instead of one. Some five years later, Richard
Arkwright provided a roller water-frame spinning machine which spun a
firmer yarn than Hargreaves' machine. Ten years later (1779), Samuel
Crompton invented the "mule spinner," which spun even more rapidly
and efficiently. By around 1785 the "mule spinner" was in general use
in England. Better looms to weave cloth were now needed. In 1738,
John Kay had invented a flying shuttle which made hand weaving about
twice as easy as it had been before. In 1787 Edmund Cartwright in-
vented a power loom, which soon replaced the hand loom. The invention
of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney in the United States in 1793 enormously
facilitated mechanical production of cotton goods. It removed the
seeds from raw cotton by mechanical methods, thus making cotton avail-
able in quantities suitable for mechanical manufacture.

Between 1750 and 1825, mechanical methods of spinning and weaving
were thus successfully devised and practically applied. These inventions
rendered necessary new types of power for driving the machinery. Water
power, which had been utilized since primitive times, was cheap and ade-
quate where it could be found, but it was not available in all places where
men desired to build factories. Hence it was supplemented by the steam
engine.

The steam engine had been invented as a sort of mechanical toy in the
Greek period, and in the form of a steam-propelled atmosphere engine
it had been in use in the early part of the eighteenth century for the pur-
pose of pumping water out of mines. It remained for a Scottish me-
chanic, James Watt, to invent, in 1769, the true steam engine and thus
provide the basic type of power long used in modern industry and trans-
portation. The steam engine has since been supplemented by the steam
turbine, the internal combustion engine, and the increasingly popular
and efficient electric motor.

The new machines and engines required stronger materials than wood.
Iron and steel, as produced by the crude methods of the mid-eighteenth
century, were too expensive. The first problem in the production of
cheaper iron products was to find more suitable fuel than charcoal for
smelting ore. In the early eighteenth century Abraham Darby learned

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF .INDUSTRY 95

how to use coke in his furnaces in England. About 1760, John Smeaton
invented the air-blast furnace. On the basis of these innovations, Peter
Onions and Henry Cort invented the puddling process for making malle-
able iron relatively cheaply and in large quantities. Their methods were
improved upon by Joseph Hall about 1830, and at the same time James
Neilson invented the hot-blast furnace. Cort and Purnell invented the
rolling mill, and John Wilkinson and John Roebuck combined efficient fac-
tory methods with these new processes for making iron. In the 1840's
Sir Henry Bessemer extended the methods used by Cort and Onions to
the manufacture of low-cost steel. The Bessemer process is still em-
ployed for making low-grade steel products, but it has been supplemented
by the Siemens-Martin, or open-hearth process for a better grade of steel.

The need for a greater volume and a wider diversity of raw materials,
together with the vast increase of finished products produced by the new
machinery, made extensive improvements desirable in methods of trans-
portation. Better roads were devised by Telford, Macadam, and others,
early in the nineteenth century. These first achievements were followed
by success in making asphalt and concrete highways. A great network
of canals was constructed in the wake of the initial activities of the Duke
of Bridgewater and his chief engineer, James Brindley, in England, fol-
lowing 1760. The steam locomotive was invented by George Stephenson,
and the modern railroad and steam transportation on land came into
being after 1825. Fitch, Symington, Fulton, and others successfully
applied the steam engine to water navigation through the invention of the
steamboat. The new methods of manufacturing iron and steel soon made
possible greatly improved types of ocean-going boats. The screw pro-
peller invented by John Ericsson notably increased the efficiency of the
steamboat.

The Second and Third Industrial Revolutions: Mass Production.
These inventions in the realms of textiles, iron and steel, manufacturing,
and transportation are usually regarded as constituting the essence of the
Industrial Revolution. But, in reality, they constituted only the first
industrial revolution. A second industrial revolution followed closely
upon its heels. We are already entering upon a third, and perhaps more
momentous, one. The second Industrial Revolution fell mainly between
the periods of our Civil War and the World War. The third began to
make its appearance at the close of the World War.

The second Industrial Revolution brought into existence bigger and bet-
ter machinery in those fields where there had been notable inventions
during the first industrial revolution. For example, the manufacture of
textiles and of iron and steel products became ever more efficient. Rail-
road trains and steamboats became larger and speedier. There have
been, however, many novel developments which were anticipated only
faintly, if at all, during the first Industrial Revolution. Especially im-
portant has been the application of chemistry to industrial processes.
It brought about more efficient methods of making steel. It also laid
the basis for the enormously important rubber industry, which today ex-

96 PHASES OF. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

tends from automobile tires to the most varied articles of clothing and
sanitary devices. The discoveries of Charles Goodyear, about 1840,
made possible the further development of the rubber industry. It was
chemistry which taught us how to refine petroleum and to produce more
cheaply the gasoline which is essential for the internal combustion engine.
Organic chemistry has enabled us to manufacture a vast variety of syn-
thetic products and to utilize many by-products which were formerly
wasted. For example, it requires two pages of a large book merely to
tabulate the by-products derived from cottonseed, running all the way
from explosives and camera films to soap and cosmetics.

Power and transportation were also revolutionized. The steam tur-
bine and the internal combustion engine made their appearance in the
last, third of the ninteenth century, the Diesel engine and the electric
motor in the twentieth. The bicycle, the automobile, and the airplane
have followed in rapid succession. Streamlined and Diesel-motored
railroad trains are competing effectively with increasing airplane
transport.

The revolutions in the communication of information have paralleled
those in power and transport. Marconi gave us the wireless telegraph,
and within less than two decades the wireless telephone, or radio, made
its appearance. We stand on the eve of practical television. Improved
printing presses and typsetting machinery, more efficient methods of
making stereotyped plates, the use of cables and wireless, and the appear-
ance of radio pictures have made news more comprehensive and instan-
taneous.

The second Industrial Revolution brought about a vast increase in the
volume of production. The larger factories and better machines made
mass production feasible. Industrial units became ever larger. There
are today in the United States over a score of billion-dollar industrial
enterprises. Industry has also tended to become localized in such a
manner as to realize the maximum advantages in the assembling of raw
materials and the distribution of finished products.

The greater difficulties of administering these vast industrial organiza-
tions have given rise to the science of business management and personnel
administration. Efficiency has increased and wastes are eliminated to
an ever greater degree. More abundant production has brought to the
fore the necessity of improving salesmanship, to dispose of the increased
volume of products. To meet this need, commercial advertising has
developed on an unprecedented scale.

Impressive though the achievements of the second Industrial Revolu-
tion may be, we are entering an even more amazing industrial era in
what is coming to be known as the third Industrial Revolution, or "the
power age." The most remarkable addition to manufacturing efficiency
already in common use is the so-called "speed-up" process which underlies
contemporary mass production. This has been made possible by the
wholesale manufacture of interchangeable parts and the development
of the conveyor-belt.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 97

The introduction of the photo-electric cell or "electric eye" for the auto-
matic control of mechanical processes has brought about an increase in
productive efficiency.10 For example, the manufacture of electric light
bulbs is no less than ten thousand times more efficient in terms of produc-
tion per man power than were methods previously employed. On the
basis of carefully compiled statistics, it has been shown that production
per man-hour has more than tripled since 1900. Using the production of
1900 as 100, man-hour production in 1919 was 136; in 1939 it was 325;
and in 1940 it was 330.

The onset of the third Industrial Revolution is characterized by the
increased use of electricity. Formerly generated mainly by water power,
it is now coming to be produced more and more by gigantic steam tur-
bines. Four of the largest turbines known in the United States can
produce more energy than the entire working population of the country.
The location of turbines close to the site of use saves the expense of build-
ing transmission lines and the large waste of current incident to long-
distance transmission.

The introduction of automatic machinery and the greater utilization of
more cheaply produced electricity threatens mankind with technological
unemployment to an extent unknown in human experience. It is believed
by many that the third Industrial Revolution is rapidly producing tend-
encies quite incompatible with the ideals and practices of a democratic
and capitalistic culture.

As the brilliant French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, pointed out in his
ingenious system of social philosophy, inventions are the chief source of
innovations in modern culture. Only by inventions can culture be
changed in any very fundamental way. In addition to local inventions,
there is also the borrowing by one group of the inventions which another
community has produced. Above all, the spirit of invention is a denial
of the repetition and stability that characterized pastoral and agricultural
society.

Inventions were few and relatively infrequent down to the middle of
the eighteenth century. In fact, the condition of technology was rela-
tively static for thousands of years prior to 1700. At the present time,
a single year often witnesses a number of inventions far in excess of
those produced in a thousand years previous to 1700. Furthermore, with
the progress of modern technology, they are no longer the chance product
of a unique genius. They are becoming the natural and inevitable result
of scientific research and experimentation. Given a definite need, an
invention is well-nigh inevitable, as William F. Ogburn and others have
proved by citing numerous inventions arrived at independently and
almost synchronously by a number of different inventors. It is not now
so much a question whether it is possible as whether it will pay to
produce and market it.

10 Qn the photo-electric eye, see Atlantic Monthly, December, 1940.

98 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

However, the great productive capacity of our modern industrial plants
has never been realized except in war time. Our economic system is based
upon scarcity and curtailed production, while our technology is adjusted
to plenty. Until we are able to create an economic order which sanctions
and encourages full productive efficiency we are never likely to realize
anything like our actual productive capacity in peace time. Our business
order even deliberately holds back technological advances through fre-
quent suppression of inventions and patents which would upset invest-
ments in obsolete equipment. Harold Loeb estimates that we waste
between 30 and 50 billion dollars each year in potential production of
goods as a result of the anti-social and non-economic practices associated
with the scarcity economy. And we probably waste an equal amount in
the inefficient handling of the problems of distribution and consumption
of food and goods.11

The most important recent developments working against the prevail-
ing economy of scarcity have been the rationalization of industry and
economic planning. These have taken place mainly in Germany and
Russia. In rationalizing industry both the state and private producers
cooperate in planning production, in eliminating waste, in abandoning
inferior plants, and in stimulating invention and engineering efficiency.
This program was first elaborately developed in Germany after the first
World War. It was used as a method of enabling Germany to recover
from the industrial losses sustained during the war.

In Soviet Russia a planned economy with no restriction of production
has been achieved. It rests upon three comprehensive five-year plans,
the first set up in October, 1928, the second in January, 1933, and the
third in January, 1938. The utmost possible efficiency is aimed at.
However, the Russians have not yet been able to develop the same degree
of mechanical expertness that has been attained in Germany and the
United States.

A less resolute effort at a planned economy was made in Nazi Germany,
where four-year plans were announced in 1934 and in 1937. The Nazi
four-year plans had in part a military goal — to make the country inde-
pendent, so far as possible, of imports. The result was an increase of
efficiency in production, though much of it went into armament and did
not bring about any marked increase in the welfare of the people.

Leading Periods in the Development of
Trade and Commerce

In treating the rise and growth of commerce, we should recall what has
been said earlier concerning the development of transportation facilities,
upon which commerce so closely depends. Inventive genius in manu-

The Social Frontier, November, 1938, pp. 44-46.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 99

f acturing and transportation has been mainly responsible for the existence
of trade, both local and foreign.

There seems to have been some trade on a barter basis in flint and bone
implements, skins, grains, and a few other rudimentary commodities by
early man, but systematic trade over a considerable area began in ancient
Egypt and Babylonia. Egypt carried on an extensive trade across the
desert of northern Africa, down the Nile to Nubia and the Sudan, eastward
to the peninsula of Sinai and Arabia, and into Syria. Not only did the
Egyptians create a large overland trade, but they seem to have been the
first to conquer the sea and to launch commerce on the Red and Mediter-
ranean Seas. The land trade of the Egyptians was carried on chiefly by
means of donkey caravans. We usually associate camels with desert
commerce, but they were not introduced in ancient Egypt until very
late.

The Babylonians built up a large overland trade, which followed the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and then went west through the mountain
passes to the Syrian coast. The government gave security to Babylonian
commerce by sending portions of the army to police the trade routes.

But the great land traders of the ancient East were the Arameans of
Syria. From their cities, like Damascus, they established control over
the rich land commerce of western Asia. Their language became the
universal language of the area for commercial and cultural purposes.

The first important people that founded their culture and power mainly
on the basis of sea trade were the inhabitants of ancient Crete. By 2500
B.C. the Cretans had created a prosperous commercial civilization, which
lasted until about 1500 B.C.

The next great sea traders of the Near East were the Phoencians, who
carried their commerce and culture throughout the Mediterranean, and
even skirted the coasts of western Africa and western Europe.

Greece replaced the Phoenician cities as the leader in Mediterranean
commerce after 600 B.C. In the fifth century B.C., Athens became the
great commercial state of the Mediterranean and for a time dominated
its commerce. Greek products were sent abroad in exchange for the
wheat which was so sorely needed. Even after Athens lost its political
independence it still carried on a good deal of sea trade.

Athenian dominion was followed by that of Alexandria, which built
larger ships than the Athenians were ever able to float and for a time
conducted an extremely prosperous commercial activity. Carthage, a
Phoenician colony in northern Africa, dominated much of the trade of
the Mediterranean from 400 B.C. until it was destroyed by the Romans;
two centuries later.

Rome utilized the maritime genius of its conquered peoples, such as the
sailors of Athens and Alexandria, to assist in carrying on the Roman trade
which was necessary to supply Rome with both the luxuries and necessi-
ties— especially wheat. Indeed, Rome was a parasitic economy which
lived mainly on the imported resources of the Near East and Gaul.

100 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

From the time of the Egyptians to that of the Muslims, Mediterranean
trade was seriously handicapped by the lack of the compass. Ships had
to keep in sight of land and hence the hazard of shipwreck was greatly
increased. The misfortunes of St. Paul on his famous trip to Rome were
not unusual for a sea voyage in ancient times.

During the early Middle Ages the trade of the Mediterranean was
divided between the merchants of the Greek Empire in Constantinople
and the Muslim traders. The Muslims were unquestionably the leading
traders. They ranged from India and China to northern Africa and
Spain, carrying with them Muslim products and culture.

Medieval trade in Christian Europe did not reach large proportions
until after the Crusades had brought western Europe in contact with the
riches of the East. Then the Italian cities dominated European foreign
trade. They brought the much desired products of the Near East —
especially the spices needed to preserve meat — to the cities of western
Europe, where they were disposed of mainly during the course of great
national or local fairs. Overland trade in Europe in the Middle Ages
operated under great handicaps as a result of poor roads and rudimentary
conveyances. In addition, there was the danger of being ravished and
murdered by the robber barons that preyed on the merchant trains.
Much of the medieval trade in northern Europe was sea trade controlled
by great organizations of merchants like the London Hanse and the
Hanseatic League, the latter made up chiefly of cities in northern Ger-
many.

Down to the time of Columbus the trade of the world was carried
either on the land or on rivers and inland seas. After the beginning of
the sixteenth century, trade for the first time became oceanic, as the
result of the expansion of Europe and the Commercial Revolution.

Medieval travelers like Marco Polo had brought back stories of the
immense riches of the Far East. Overland trade with the Far East was
established across Asia, but the Italian cities were able to monopolize
most of this. The northern and western European countries were jealous
of this Italian monopoly and sought to break it down by discovering a
sea route to Asia. This led to the period of exploration 'and discovery
and brought about the Commercial Revolution which created early
modern civilization.

Between 1500 and 1800 larger ships were built and commerce attained
a volume and variety never before known in the experience of mankind.
A great number of new commodities were brought to Europe, and Euro-
pean states found a new market for their commodities in oversea areas
and in the colonies established in the New World. The Portuguese, the
Spaniards, the Dutch, the French and the English participated in this
trade, but by the close of the eighteenth century England had become
the dominant trading and naval country of the Old World.

Some elementary statistics will emphasize how the Industrial Revolu-
tion and machine production stimulated the growth of commerce. The
total trade of the world had already increased sixfold between 1750 and

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 101

1800. The following table will reveal the degree to which world trade
was further increased by the first Industrial Revolution: 12

Year Gross Commerce Commerce Per Capita

1800 $1,400,000,000 $2.31

1820 1,600,000,000 2.13

1830 1,900,000,000 2.34

1840 2,700,000,000 2.93

1850 4,000,000,000 3.76

1860 7,200,000,000 6.01

1870 10,000,000,000 8.14

As we have seen, the second Industrial Revolution greatly increased
the output of mechanical industries through increased efficiency of
machinery, the concentration of industry, the building of giant factories,
and the greater economies of mass production. All this is reflected in
the growth of world trade from 1880 to the first World War: 13

Year Gross Commerce Commerce Per Capita

1880 $14,700,000,000 $10.26

1890 17,500,000,000 11.80

1900 20,100,000,000 13.02

1910 33,600,000,000 20.81

1913 40,400,000,000 24.47

After the first World War the more efficient production of goods brought
about by the third Industrial Revolution, the reconstruction of Europe,
and the development of the automobile industry resulted in a figure of
$69,000,000,000 for the total world trade in 1929, as against $40,000,000,-
000 in 1913. The world depression after 1929 brought the total world
trade down to less than $24,000,000,000 in 1933 and 1934. The concen-
tration upon armament production rather than production for export
helped to prevent world trade from recovering completely after the worst
years of the depression. In 1938 the total world trade amounted to
about $47,000,000,000. This figure has been greatly reduced by the
second World War.

Though most discussions of trade and commerce concentrate upon
foreign trade, the exchange of commodities within groups, whether tribes
or great national commercial states, has always been greater than the
foreign trade between these groups.

Primitive men produced commodities primarily for family or com-
munity use; but with industrial specialization, local trade began.
Farmers, for example, exchanged their products for manufactured stone
implements and weapons.

Local trade on a large scale began in ancient Egypt. At first, the
craftsmen sold their products directly to consumers, but by the imperial
period a distinct merchant class had arisen which handled much of the

12Clive Day, A History of Commerce, Longmans, Green, 1922, p. 271,
is Ibid.

102 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

retail trade. Much the same situation existed in Babylonia and Assyria.
A merchant class arose in due time to control local trade ; many of them
clustered about the temples. The Aramean merchants controlled the
local and foreign trade of the Syrian city-states in western Asia.

In ancient Athens there was much production by craftsmen for a
custom trade, and some retail trade was carried on by merchants in stalls
in the public market-place.

In ancient Rome there was less retail trade than in Athens, since many
of the commodities used by the rich were made on their estates by slaves.
But there was a considerable retail trade which, as in Athens, was divided
between craftsmen and merchants.

In the Middle Ages, local trade centered in the public markets situated
just outside of a town or adjoining a monastery" or castle. There were
definite market days specified, usually once or twice a week. Here,
merchants, craftsmen, and peasants exchanged their wares and products.
Local trade on a larger scale was usually carried on through local or
regional fairs and commodities were gathered from many towns. During
much of the Middle Ages both the town markets and the fairs were con-
trolled by the merchant gilds, though in the later Middle Ages a good
deal of control of local trade was taken over by the craft gilds.

When the gild system disappeared in early modern times, local and
domestic trade fell chiefly into the hands of merchant capitalists, who
conducted the putting-out system, and small shopkeepers who handled
the retail trade through private stores. This latter system, with notable
improvements in the construction and the administration of stores, con-
tinued until the beginnings of the second Industrial Revolution.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century the increased production
brought about by the second Industrial Revolution, the growth of popula-
tion, and the improvement of transportation facilities promoted the
growth of chain stores. These sought to profit by the same large-scale
operations which had prompted the concentration of industry and the rise
of the super-factory. The first chain-store company was the Great
Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, established in 1858. The next im-
portant addition to chain stores were the five-and-ten-cent stores opened
in the 70's and 80's. After 1900 there was a tremendous growth of chain
stores. In 1929, these chain stores had gross sales of about $11,000,000,-
000, some 22 per cent of all retail trade. These chain stores have brought
many economies to consumers. But local jealousy and rivalry, exploited
by politicians, has led to attacks upon the chain stores, especially in the
effort to tax them out of existence.

Mail-order houses, especially Sears, Roebuck & Co., and Montgomery,
Ward, were aided by the creation of the parcel-post system in 1913.
Recently they have created chain stores for local trade in leading cities.
All in all, the agencies for retail trade are better adapted to serving the
public than are the factories, dominated by the policy of curtailing pro-
duction to maintain high prices.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 103

Leading Forms of Control Over Industry

Control of Agriculture. In early times, agriculture was controlled
mainly by the family and the clan. Production was for local use.
Ownership of lands and tools was communal, family, or both.

In ancient Egypt we have the first conspicuous example of the rigorous
control of agriculture by the state. In theory, the Pharaoh owned all
the land. Even over lands granted to nobles the government exercised
complete control — specifying crops, inspecting production, and demand-
ing taxes in kind. The officials of the Pharaoh made detailed and fre-
quent reports on the state of agricultural operations. The government
also exercised strict supervision over the irrigation system. The estates
of the priests were about the only Egyptian lands that were not under
governmental control.

The governments of Babyloniq, and Assyria exercised considerable
control especially over irrigation projects, but they never went as far as
the Egyptian government in the control of agriculture. Great landlords,
often using many slaves, were very prominent in Babylonian agriculture,
while a free peasantry under government protection dominated the
situation in Assyria.

In Athens, the clan and the family long controlled lands and agricul-
ture; but private enterprise grew, and eventually in Attica great land-
lords built up their estates at the expense of impoverished peasants. In
Sparta the extensive state control over agriculture was a phase of the
military socialism which dominated the life of that state.

Ancient Roman agriculture was at first mainly a family affair, but the
state soon intervened in seizing and distributing conquered lands. By
the end of Republican days Roman agriculture was dominated chiefly
by great landlords and their Latifundia, cultivated in part by slave labor.
In the later Empire the landlords defied the government and created a
system of political and economic anarchy, which was an important cause
of the break-up of the Empire in the West. In the Eastern Roman
Empire of the early Middle Ages we find a system of state control over
agriculture which, in certain regions, almost rivaled that of ancient
Egypt.

In the feudal-manorial system of western Europe, the lord's demesne
was a private agricultural enterprise, while the lands of the serfs were
cultivated under a complex system of communal control.

In England, after the manorial system broke up, we have the period of
the Squirearchy, in which the medium-sized farms of the country squires
were cultivated mainly by hired peasant workers. There were also some
free small farmers. After the middle of the eighteenth century, English
agriculture came more and more under the control of great landlords,
who pushed out the squires and peasants and created vast estates worked
by hired peasants. In France, the estates remained in the hands of

104 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

great landlords until the French Revolution. The agrarian and legal
reforms of that period converted France into a country of small farmers.
In Prussia, the Junker class carved out great estates and held them down
to the present time. In eastern Europe, a quasi-feudal system of great
estates dominated the scene until the agrarian reforms after the first
World War. In Hungary, the feudal landlords were able to escape even
these reforms and continued to hold great estates.

Since the first World War, Soviet Russia has introduced the state
ownership of land and complete state control of farming. In Fascist
countries, the state has controlled agriculture, though formal private
ownership of land still continues.

In the United States, the system of private control of agriculture and
small farming has prevailed from colonial times. But the farm crisis
since the first World War compelled the government to intervene more
and more in behalf of the stricken farmers.

The Control of Industry. In primitive times, manufacturing in-
dustries were controlled mainly by the family. Women, as Otis T. Mason
has pointed out, carried on many of the manufacturing activities, leaving
the men free for hunting and fighting.

The craftsmen in ancient Egypt belonged chiefly to the free middle
class. They paid a tax to the Pharaoh or to the nobles for the privilege
of carrying on their industrial activities. There was no such systematized
gild control over Egyptian craftsmen as we find in the Middle Ages in
Europe.

In Babylonia and Assyria, control of industry was varied and com-
plicated. The free craftsmen in the cities were not unlike those in Egypt.
There was also slave labor, especially in shops on the estates of the
priests. Then there were a large number of slave workers employed by
the kings, the great nobles, and in the temple workshops.

In Athens, industrial control was also complex. There were some free
craftsmen of the citizen class, but most Greek craftsmen were free
foreigners or slaves. The craftsmen worked at home or in small estab-
lishments, and there was a fairly elaborate system of organization and
specialization. The apprenticeship system was well developed. The
craftsmen maintained their professional independence even when in state
employ.

In early Rome most craftsmen were free, and were dominated by the
family system. In late Republican days most industrial production
was carried on by freedmen and slaves. The large proportion of slave
labor in industry tended to drive free craftsmen out of industry. Many
of them joined with the dispossessed peasants to create the city mob. that
was supported under the system of bread-and-circuses. The status and
operations of such free craftsmen as existed in the Roman Republic and
Empire did not differ widely from the situation in Athens.

In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, industrial operations were con-
trolled by the craft gilds, where we find masters, apprentices, and journey-
men.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 105

In addition to the generally thorough technical preparation that the
apprentice received, he was also given a moral education, apprenticeship
being designed to make him socially useful as well as industrially skilled.

The period of apprenticeship ranged from three to as high as twelve
years, depending on the difficulty of the trade. A seven-year period was
most common in England. In some crafts apprentices received regular
wages towards the close of their service. Runaway apprentices were
returned to their masters and punished. If the offense became habitual,
the apprentice was debarred from the craft for all time. On the other
hand, masters guilty of harsh or ill treatment of their apprentices might
be punished by the gild. In England, one to four apprentices to a master
seems to have been usual. The number of apprentices was further re-
stricted, especially in the later days of the gild, by the desire of both
masters and journeymen to avoid competition.

When his term of service was over, the apprentice became a journey-
man, and was employed by a master workman at specified wages. The
journeyman was a candidate for mastership. At an earlier period in
France, the apprentice, having completed his training and proved his
fitness, was eligible to mastership if he possessed the necessary capital.
In time, several years' employment as a journeyman became customary
before a craftsman could become a master. In England, as a rule, the
journeyman set himself up as a master when he was at least twenty-three
years old, possessed sufficient capital, and had given the gild officials some
proof of his skill as a workman.

Following the gild system came what we call the domestic or putting-
out system, which had first developed in Italy in the Middle Ages and
had spread to the Low Countries in early modern times. It was intro-
duced into England in the fifteenth century, after the gild system had
lost its grip. It was at first limited mainly to the woolen and worsted
industries. Following are some differences between the putting-out
system and the gild system.

Instead of collecting in the household of a gild master, the workers
under this system lived in their own dwellings in the towns or in the
adjacent countryside. The person who controlled all phases of this
manufacturing process was known as a merchant-capitalist, or more
N technically, in the woolen industry, as a clothier. He furnished the
original capital with which to establish the business and sent out the raw
materials to be worked up by the laborers at a rate agreed upon. The
representatives of the merchant-capitalist could then go to the homes of
the contract workers, leave more raw material, and collect the finished
work. This merchant-capitalist was not merely superimposed upon a
single craft — his group was the organizing center of the whole grotip of
crafts in the industry. For example, the clothier bought raw wool in
the market or from the raisers, sent it in turn to spinners, weavers, fullers,
and dyers, and finally marketed the finished product.

The most important differences between the gild and the putting-out
systems were those which helped to develop a capitalistic tendency on

106 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

the part of the merchant, the dominant figure in the process. Inciden-
tally, in some ways the workers, who owned their own tools, were for a
while more independent than under the old gild order. Later, however,
the workers lost their independence to the merchants, who often supplied
them with both materials and tools. In this phase, some of the worst
evils, later associated with modern industrialism, put in appearance:
woman and child labor, low wages, and the "sweating" of the workers.

Some disadvantages of the putting-out system were the impossibility
of continuous supervision, the tendency of workers to get drunk on pay-
day and stay intoxicated until their wages were used up, dishonesty on
the part of workmen, and waste of time in distributing raw materials and
picking up finished products.

These difficulties led to the appearance of some large central shops-
many writers call them factories — before the modern mechanical tech-
nique had been introduced. Here men were kept at work by foremen
who were representatives of the merchant-capitalists. From the stand-
point of personnel organization, this arrangement had all the advantages
to the employer of the factory system, as we know it, except one — the cost
of the- tools was still so slight that the craftsman in most trades still had
som.6 chance to work for himself if he thought the employers were unjust.

'If it had become general, there is every reason to suppose that the
central shop would have exhibited most of the defects and inconveniences
of the factory system, such as crowded living conditions and the central-
ization of control in the hands of a few persons. Its slow growth and its
restriction to a few industries suggest that the disadvantages of central-
ization before machines came in must have just about balanced the
advantages until the Industrial Revolution threw an overwhelming weight
into the scales on the side of the factory.

The impressive so-called factory system grew up out of the Industrial
Revolution as an inevitable aftermath of mechanical production. Many
regard the factory system as identical with the machine technique.
However, the machine technique comprehends our modern method of
manufacturing and the like, while the factory system represents the
method of organizing and applying labor to productive processes. Fac-
tories of a crude sort — central shops — not only could but did exist long
before machinery was provided ; but it was difficult, if not impossible, to
introduce the new machinery without setting up the factory system. It
was impractical to introduce machinery into the homes of workers be-
cause of the lack of space and of power.

Improvements in transportation so enlarged the manufacturers' possi-
ble market that they could sell a great number of articles exactly alike.
Each process could now be broken up into many routine operations, per-
formed chiefly by machines and merely supervised by the workers.
Before the development of electrical appliances, power to run machines
was transmitted directly by shafts and belts, which meant that it must
be used fairly close to its source. Other elements determining the loca-
tion of factories were the existence of natural resources (such as coal,

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 107

iron ore, and petroleum), ease of transportation, and markets. All these
considerations made the factory system inevitable.

The most striking characteristic of the factory system is that it brought
together in one establishment a larger number of workmen than had ever
been assembled in any earlier type of industrial operation. While a
factory may employ only a score or so of workmen, the characteristic
modern factory has hundreds or thousands of employees.

The factory system provided a greater opportunity for the close
control, supervision, and discipline of labor. The modern factory worker
is normally more at the mercy of the employing class than was the gild
journeyman, who might himself become a master, since the tools he used
were relatively inexpensive. Discipline in the factory system is more
rigorous than in the putting-out system, under which the capitalist or
his representative visited the employees only to distribute raw materials
or to collect finished products. Before the development of labor organ-
izations, factory workers were almost entirely dependent upon the will of
their employers, and their daily presence in the plant was made obligatory
upon penalty of discharge.

The factory rendered such discipline and regimentation absolutely in-
evitable. A loose supervision based upon personal contacts might have
been sufficient for the small gild establishment; but, with hundreds of
factory workers under one roof, it became necessary to issue certain rules
defining the hours of labor, the assignment of individual tasks, the atti-
tude of the employee in his relations with the employer, details of conduct
within the factory, and even the matter of orderly entering and leaving.
So elaborate are some of these codes of factory discipline that their com-
plete and literal execution would paralyze the operation of the plant.

The first adequate code of factory discipline was worked out by Sir
Richard Arkwright in England after 1770. Arkwright's own factories
proved so successful and his code seemed so adequate that it was widely
adopted in Europe and was the parent of the later and more perfect ones
of the nineteenth century.

Lately, these conventional codes of factory discipline have been criti-
cized for sacrificing to order and regimentation most of the normal
human impulses toward creative effort — or, for that matter, toward any
effort whatever beyond that compulsory for holding a job. One result
was the development of the modern sciences of personnel management
and industrial psychology and of attempts to humanize the factory.

The machine technique itself tends to mechanize the workman, who
often carries on a narrowly specialized routine operation throughout most
or all of his active life. In this way, all those advantages of special
training and the repetition of familiar simple motions may be easily
realized. Ad^m Smith pointed out long ago the great advantages in-
herent in this subdivision of industrial processes, but he could not foresee
the elaborate and intricate development of the division of labor in the
modern factory.

The gains in productivity are partly offset by the indolence and the

108 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

indifference to craftsmanship growing out of the highly regimented factory
system. The machine technique itself is charged with producing un-
necessary fatigue and various occupational nervous disorders. Industrial
and abnormal psychology has been trying to get at the exact causes of
such human wastage, in order to suggest better means of adapting our
manufacturing processes to the human beings by and for whom they
are carried on.

A striking factory development was the speed-up system, first introduced
by Henry Ford. It rests upon two major mechanical principles: (1) that
of interchangeable parts, first devised by Eli Whitney in the manufacture
of muskets, and (2) the endless conveyor belt, which brings around the
parts to be assembled. This was first used by the Chicago meat packers,
who used an overhead trolley to bring carcasses of beef along the line of
butchers. The results were astonishing. In 1914, the Ford plants were
turning out about 700 cars daily; on November 4, 1924, 7,500 cars were
turned out in a single day. The nature of work under the speed-up
system has thus been described by a workman in the Ford plant:

As a result of the conveyor system, upon which the whole plant is operated,
the men have no time to talk to each other; have no rest except for fifteen or
twenty minutes at lunch time; and can go to the toilet only when substitutes are
ready to relieve them at the "belt." One operation upon which I worked re-
quired that I be on the job, ready to work, just as soon as the preceding shift
went off; work up to the exact minute for lunch time; take a couple of minutes
to clean up and get my lunch kit and be back thirteen minutes later to work.
There was never a moment of leisure or opportunity to turn my head. . . ,14

Under such conditions the average man risks a nervous or physical
breakdown, or both, after two or three years of steady employment. But
eager and hungry men are standing in line to take the place of the
discarded human wreckage.

Nevertheless the speed-up process has a great economic appeal. Ford
made the country "mass-production conscious," and mass production
spread from his plant in Dearborn to other industries throughout the
country.

t A more humane method of realizing industrial efficiency is that of
scientific management in our leading factories. Its foremost figures
were three American engineers and industrialists: Frederick W. Taylor
(1856-1915), Henry L. Gantt (1861-1919), and Frank B. Gilbreth
(1868-1924). The moving spirit was Taylor. A Taylor Society has
been formed in his honor, devoted to the principles of scientific factory
management. The movement centers around the elimination of waste
and the introduction of more efficient standards of production, based
upon a careful study of factory methods and improvements in technology.

Both mass production and scientific management have been embodied
in the rationalization of industry adopted by Germany since the first
World War.

i*New Republic, March 16, 1932, p. 117.

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 109

In Fascist countries, the state controls industry, though ownership
remains mainly in private hands. In Soviet Russia, the state not only
controls industry but owns and operates the means of producing and
distributing goods. Russia has introduced a speed-up system divorced
from the profit system. The first such experiment, started in 1928, was
the so-called Shock-Brigade movement, in which workers banded together
and declared their determination to keep machines working constantly
at the highest degree of efficiency. More recently the Stakhanov move-
ment offered rewards to workers who turned out the greatest possible
volume of products. It took its name from a miner, Alexey Stakhanov,
who, in 1935, increased coal production in his gang five-fold. This Rus-
sian speed-up system rests upon an appeal to the competitive spirit of
man and to devotion to the country and its policies.

Even in capitalistic and democratic countries, depression, preparedness,
and war have brought about increasing trends toward state control of
industry. It would seem that we are moving toward a system in which
the dominant type of industrial control will be the factory under state
management and perhaps under state ownership.

The most recent and promising proposal for industrial control is what
has been called Technocracy, under which economic life would be directed
by industrial engineers who would produce for human service rather than
for private profit. Those who favor this plan tell us that Technocracy
will prove far more efficient than the speed-up system and will be much
more humane than the best managed factory today. They assert, for
example, that a high standard of living can be maintained with our pres-
ent industrial plant without working more than ten to fifteen hours a
week.

The Control of Trade. In primitive times, such trade as existed was
controlled by the community and the family. It was mainly an exchange
of goods resulting from the specialization of industry in the local com-
munity.

In Egypt, local trade was controlled mainly by the craftsmen and
merchants, who purchased concessions from the government. Foreign
trade was partially in the hands of merchants and their caravans and
partly in the hands of commercial expeditions sent out by the Pharaoh.
Even private foreign trade was carefully regulated by the government,
and merchants had to surrender part of their profits to the crown. In
return, the government protected trade routes on land and sea. The
situation was not greatly different in Mesopotamia, though the govern-
ment did not regulate and exploit foreign trade quite so much as
did the Egyptian government. But it did impose restrictions, penal-
ize dishonesty, and levy tribute. In return, it also policed the trade
routes.

In Athens, local trade was controlled by free merchants and craftsmen.
The state intervened to regulate market conditions, to inspect weights
and measures, and to fix the prices of the necessities of life. Foreign
trade was chiefly in private hands, though there was considerable state

110 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

regulation of the grain trade in order to secure an adequate supply of
wheat.

Domestic trade in Rome was mainly in the hands of free merchants.
The foreign trade was more thoroughly regulated and controlled by the
state in order to secure an adequate grain supply and keep the rabble
contented. Foreign trade in Greece and Rome was generally free and
private, as compared with the degree of state regulation in the ancient
Orient.

In the Middle Ages, both domestic and foreign trade were chiefly con-
trolled by the merchant gilds, which essentially governed the medieval
towns. They dominated the fairs and imposed penalties for dishonest
practices. Since industry was mainly town industry and since the
merchant gilds usually dominated town government, medieval control
of commerce was essentially a system of government regulation, though
it was by the local rather than the central government. Foreign trade
in the later Middle Ages was also controlled by great organizations of
merchants, the so-called Hanses, such as the Hanse of London, and the
Hanseatic League.

When the gild system broke down and commerce expanded as the result
of the Commercial Revolution, there developed an extreme form of gov-
ernment control over trade, generally known as Mercantilism Under
this system the government attempted complete regulation of foreign
trade, especially the foreign trade of colonies, in order to increase the
wealth and the supply of precious metals in the mother country. It was
a commercial form of state capitalism.

After the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturers and merchants were
for a time able to reduce the degree of governmental interference and to
encourage free trade. But, following 1870, the system of protective
tariffs, which constitute the modern form of governmental control of
trade, became ever more prevalent. After the first World War the pro-
tective system became most extensive and rigid.

In totalitarian states the government controls domestic and foreign
trade, though it may allow certain freedom in domestic trade. The
Nazis in Germany especially concentrated on the control of foreign trade,
and* worked out an ingenious system of barter in foreign commerce. Even
where money was used, a special monetary system was employed in
foreign trade.

In Soviet Russia, the state assumed control over both domestic and
foreign trade. In country districts the cooperatives were allowed to
participate in retail trade, but they were checked in the cities ; there the
state stores dominate. The foreign trade of Russia is a governmental
monopoly.

The tense conditions produced by rearmament and the second World
War brought about an increasing degree of state control over trade which
extended even to the democratic states now engaged in the second World
War. We seem to be headed for a revival of # new Merc.antiUsna — really

PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 111

state capitalism and social planning — more sweeping and far-reaching
than anything known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Motives of Industrial Effort

So habitual and firmly entrenched is the profit system that we usually
take it for granted that man has always produced mainly for private
profit. In fact, however, man has made goods for profit during only
about one per cent of the time he has been on the planet. Down to the
dawn of history among the Egyptians and Babylonians, productive effort
was devoted exclusively to providing materials for the direct and imme-
diate use of the family or community. Tli^ere was little or no sale of
goods for gain.

The profit system grew slowly and did not get under full headway until
modern times. It had little standing in the civic ethics of Greece and
Rome and even less in the religious ethics of the medieval Catholic
Church. It was first given prestige and respectability by commercial
capitalism and Protestant ethics in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. Protestant preachers used such texts as "Seest thou a man
diligent in business? He shall stand before kings" — later the favorite
biblical quotation of John D. Rockefeller.

After 1600, the opportunity to make profits out of industry offered a
great impulse to industrial effort. Since the corporate revolution of the
present century, however, this has been less true. Those who control
and manage industry today get only a small part of the profits of in-
dustry. Hence they are encouraged to exploit industry rather than
to run it efficiently.15

It is also true that the profit system greatly handicaps productive
enterprise, because it is closely linked up with an economy of scarcity.
It is thought that only by keeping goods scarce can prices be kept high
and profits made. Hence, there is an effort through monopoly and other
"bottle-necks of business" to restrict production if it threatens to reduce
prices.

Another motive of industry which has been significant since early times
has been the "instinct of workmanship," more accurately described as
pride in excellent workmanship. We find this among primitive peoples
who exhibit special gratification in a fine piece of work. Greek work-
men, especially on public enterprises, took a special pride in excellence
of workmanship. In the medieval craft gilds, pride of workmanship was
a powerful force. Nearly a century ago, John Ruskin and William
Morris made an effort to revive the pride of workmanship within the
framework of industrial society.

It must be admitted that pride of workmanship today is limited mainly
to the fine arts. Employers are chiefly concerned with security specula-

is See below, pp. 127 ff.

112 PHASES OF THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

tion, clipping coupons, and cashing dividend checks, while the workers
have their eyes mainly on the pay envelope.

With the current breakdown of private capitalism and the profit system
and the evident inadequacies of the scarcity economy, there is a trend
towards state control of industry for the purpose of direct human use and
human service instead of private profit. To get the populace to coop-
erate, much stress is laid on the possibility of securing plenty and a high
standard of living with a minimum of work. An appeal is also made to
pride in workmanship. But thus far it has been found necessary also
to appeal to less noble motives, such as the competitive spirit and special
rewards for unusual productive effort.

Whatever the possible adequacy of industrial motives other than the
profit system, it is evident that the world is going to be in a difficult
economic situation unless additional incentives can be found. The eco-
nomic order which gave birth to and nourished the profit system is now,
however much we may regret it, on its last legs. Other industrial motives
must be found if we are to create a permanent and better economic
order.16

10 Cf. J. A. Hobson, Incentives in the New Industrial Order, Seltzer, 1925; and
H. F. Ward, In Place of Profit, Scribner, 1933.

CHAPTER V
Capitalism and the Economic Crisis

The Fundamental Nature of Economic Problems

IT DOES not require any Marxian dogmatism or any fanatical adher-
ence to the economic interpretation of history to lead one to the conclusion
that the crisis in contemporary capitalism and the economic problems
related thereunto are fundamental to most of the other social problems
of the twentieth century. The remaining ones grow out of the economic
situation, or their solution must be held up until the economic crisis is
satisfactorily resolved. We can easily illustrate this by a few ready
examples.

It is obvious that the question of poverty is closely linked to our eco-
nomic system. There had been poverty in earlier economic systems, but
its causes and nature were quite different from poverty in the twentieth
century among civilized peoples. In earlier ages, poverty was due pri-
marily'to the fact that there were not goods, wealth, and food enough
to provide high living standards for the whole population. Today, we
would be able to produce with great ease all the goods and food required
for a Utopian living standard. But the profit system, as administered,
greatly reduces potential productive capacity. We could probably pro-
duce more than twice as many goods as we do with the existing national
industrial plant if we operated it in terms of engineering efficiency. Even
more, we do not seem able to put enough income in the hands of the mass
of purchasers to enable them to buy even the restricted product which
we turn out. We could produce all the food required for a very high
standard of living on one fifth of the land now under cultivation, and
with one fifth of the personnel now engaged in agriculture. We are tech-
nologically set up to realize Utopia almost overnight. But our economic
system prevents us from taking full advantage of labor-saving machinery
in the interests of social well-being. Rather, the most important tech-
nological advances today threaten the very existence of our economic
order by creating an ever larger volume of unemployment, which private
capitalism either cannot or will not assume the responsibility for making
a realistic effort to avert. Our overcrowded cities, the massing of popu-
lation, and the defective housing of most urban dwellers are tied up
directly with the system of private profit in real estate activities. If we

113

114 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

take steps to reorganize and distribute urban populations in suburban
areas, this will be due primarily to the fact that business has discovered
the economic advantages of smaller urban units in an age of electrical
power.

Our population problems are serious mainly because of the economic
factors directly involved. Our present productive capacity, if used
efficiently, would enable us to rise superior to population fluctuations.
We are today able to take care of any prospective population, so far as
the necessities of life are concerned. Under a system of production for
use, we would not have to worry about any decrease in the number of
customers in the case of a rapidly falling birth-rate. We could simply
produce for the needs of those who exist at any given time. The fact
that population is increasing most rapidly among poverty-stricken farm-
ers and the working classes in the cities is a serious matter mainly because
the income of these groups does not enable them to provide adequate
living standards and suitable education for their children. Crime and
vice are caused to a very considerable extent by poverty. The organized
criminality of our day is motivated mainly by greed, and has imitated
in an exaggerated degree the ideals and practices of big business and
finance.

The traditional family is breaking down chiefly because of influences
contributed by the rise of modern industrialism. A major reason for
family friction and disintegration is inadequate income and the worries
created by a sense of economic insecurity. Race problems and the Negro
question in this country are as much economic in character as physiologi-
cal and psychological. Our contemporary Negro problem rests on an
economic basis, though a somewhat different one, just as the Negro prob-
lem did in the era of slavery. The impending collapse of democracy
arises primarily out of the fact that we attempt to handle our complicated
economic problems through politics and the party system rather than
by means of engineering science. We have carried over into our tech-
nological era the political methods and ideals which prevailed in a rural
and handicraft epoch. Our rural or farm problem is chiefly a manifesta-
tion of the paradoxes created by the effort to control an economy of
abundance by notions which have come down from the era of scarcity.
The agrarian policies of Diocletian hang over in an age of combines and
gasoline tractors.

The agencies of communication are thoroughly contaminated by vari-
ous manifestations of our economic problems. The press and the radio
are devoted, to a large extent, to propaganda in favor of contemporary
business and financial ideals. But such radical journals and radio sta-
tions as exist show an equal bias in their very vigorous opposition
to the existing economic order. Objective opinion is difficult to secure
and ever harder to express in effective fashion. The greater part of
education reflects the ideals of leisure-class psychology. It is more
concerned with transmitting the reputable economic tradition than with
discovering the realities of present-day life and using these as the basis

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 115

of preparation for a new and better social system. The great interna-
tional crisis of our age directly reflects the underlying economic crisis.
In countries where capitalism is breaking down, the economic debacle is
handled by a dictatorship of the Right or the Left. The former we call
Fascism and the latter expresses itself today mainly in the form of
Russian "communism." One works towards state capitalism and the
other follows the method of state socialism, but both repudiate private
business enterprise as we know it in the United States.

While modern wars are something more than a simple struggle between
the "haves" and the "have-nots," no realistic student of the international
scene in our day doubts the fundamental character of the economic fac-
tors underlying the international line-up and the second World War.
We could go on indefinitely with such illustrations, but the foregoing
summary is sufficient to demonstrate the validity of our thesis that eco-
nomic problems are basic to most other social problems in the second
third of the twentieth century.

The Historical Background and the Rise of Capitalism

While the conditions essential to the complete realization of a capital-
istic economy did not all come into existence until the late eighteenth
century, various contributions to the capitalistic complex came from
earlier ages, and to these we may now devote our attention very briefly.

In ancient Egypt, while the extensive degree of state control over all
forms of economic life prevented the rise of anything like free capitalism,
there was, nevertheless, some private business and commercial enterprise,
and the first great private fortunes were accumulated. In Babylonia,
there was much more progress towards the capitalistic system. More
private enterprise was permitted and many of the business forms and
practices upon which phases of capitalism later rested had their origins
here. Business life was founded upon a remarkably wide contractual
basis. The importance of formal contracts was made manifest by the
provision that a purchase consummated without a contract or without
witnesses could be punished even by death. Deeds of settlement and
wills, partnership agreements, the relationship of principal and agent,
the forms of land deeds and house leases — all these were elaborately
regulated by law. Witnessed and sealed documents were prescribed for
all economic transactions. Promissory notes were provided for, and the
attitude towards interest was surprisingly modern. The high interest
rates — normally running from 20 to 25 per cent — were regulated by law.
However, debtors received rather considerate treatment, and oppressive
creditors were dealt with harshly.

Babylonia was thus the motherland of our modern commercial usages
and commercial paper. The mercantile Arameans carried these achieve-
ments even further. Western Europe did not surpass their forms and
processes until the rise of modern commerce and capitalism after 1500
A.D. The departure from a pure barter economy also took place at an

116 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

early date in Babylonia. A real money economy came into being, involv-
ing both the theory and practice of productive capital, though there was
no coined money until the very close of the late Babylonian epoch. The
precious metals were used by weight. Gold, which was fifteen times as
valuable as silver, was little used. This was in marked contrast to Egypt,
where gold was used almost exclusively.

Some of the traits of capitalism, such as the use of money, the accumu-
lation of large fortunes, the prevalence of private property, and some
tendency to reinvest savings in business expansion, thus existed in the
ancient Near East. But two basic institutions of capitalism, the free
market and free competition, were very slightly developed, owing to the
extensive degree of state control over economic life.

The Phoenicians were the great sea-traders of antiquity, and in their
commercial practices we find some of the first rudimentary origins of
commercial capitalism, especially the mercantile control of business.
Since one vital phase of the capitalistic economy is the use of money and
the creation of a money economy, mention should be made of the intro-
duction of coined money by the Lydians in western Asia Minor around
800 B.C. The fundamentals of a money economy had existed before
this time, monetary values being determined by weight. Coining made
monetary designations and circulation more convenient. But the value
of money still was based upon the weight of the precious metals con-
tained in each coin.

Though the Athenians engaged in extensive industrial and com-
mercial enterprise, the Greek state exerted considerable supervision over
both trade and industry. The Greeks never understood the fundamental
notion of capitalism, namely, the accumulation of savings for reinvest-
ment in business. Alfred E. Zimmern once acutely observed that
"the Greek states passed with difficulty beyond the schoolboy stage at
which every bit of money that comes in is regarded as a windfall, to be
spent gaily as the mood will have it, without thought of the morrow."
Hence the Greek economy has been called a "napkin economy." This
term is used by some economic historians to describe the primitive eco-
nomic system in which man has not learned to reinvest capital for addi-
tional profits. The term is derived from the parable of the three stewards
in the New Testament, where the poor steward, with only one talent,
refused to take the risk of investment and wrapped his single talent in a
napkin. The fact that Greek philosophers looked askance upon interest-
taking and ranked trade on almost the same ethical plane as brigandage
shows how far Greece was from attaining capitalistic attitudes and prac-
tices. Other obstacles to the development of capitalism in ancient Greece
were the absence of bankers with connections extending throughout
Greece, and the lack of exchanges for the circulation of credit, claims
and goods.

In ancient Rome, while more progress was made towards capitalism
than in Greece, business was held in disrepute by the aristocracy who
believed that agriculture was the only truly noble occupation. Cicero's

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 117

opinion on this point is representative of the Roman disdain for money-
making:

All gains made by hired labourers are dishonourable and base, for what we
buy of them is their labour, not their artistic skill: with them the very gain
itself does but increase the slavislmess of the work. All retail dealing too may
be put in the same category, for the dealer will gain nothing except by profuse
lying, and nothing is more disgraceful than untruthful huckstering. Again, the
work of all artisans (opifices) is sordid; there can be nothing honourable in a
workshop.1

Keeping in mind this prevailing attitude of the aristocratic Romans
towards business and money-making, we may briefly survey certain
economic developments in Rome between the third century B.C. and the
Christian era, which brought about a marked increase in movable wealth
and the appearance of a quasi-capitalistic class. The chief source of
this new type of wealth was neither commerce nor industry, but the
tribute and booty of conquest and the supervision of public works and
imperial finances. Imperialism, in other words, was the chief contribu-
tor to the new wealth of Rome — a diluted form of state capitalism.
Tax-farming accounted for a great deal of the money that flowed into
Rome. In addition, Rome's practice of utilizing middlemen in undertak-
ing public works, the collection of rents, the working of state lands, and
many other business activities also accounts for the growth of a moneyed
class. Collective financial enterprises in the form of joint-stock com-
panies also aided in the creation of a quasi-capitalistic class. Share-
holders in such companies, however, were drawn from almost every
class except the poor.

In consequence, there was a notable increase of capital in Rome, and
great fortunes made their appearance. This accumulation of wealth was
dramatized by the suddenness with which it took place. Rudimentary
banking was, naturally, stimulated, and money-changing became an im-
portant source of income. An exceptionally profitable business was the
lending of money at high interest by the new class of bankers. The high
maximum legal rate of 12 per cent was only too often exceeded. Specu-
lation became common, and there are records of financial crises in Rome.
The wealthy men of business formed a separate class, called the eques-
trian order (ordo equester) , the members of which were called knights
(equites). Their wealth was "movable" rather than, landed, and this
fact among others served to distinguish them from the senatorial plutoc-
racy. Towards the close of the Republic, even though real estate retained
its position of supremacy, both capital and the class that possessed it
Assumed greater importance in the Roman state.

Three important factors, however, served to hold back Roman indus-
trial and commercial development from anything like the heights which
it might otherwise have attained. All grew out of the process of conquest.
In the first place, conquest poured slaves into Rome and allowed Italy

W. W. Fowler, Social Life of Rome, Macmillan, 1909, pp. 43-44.

118 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

to lean upon a slave economy without any strong incentive to mechani-
cal invention or shrewd business management. In the second place, there
was the vast tribute from the provinces which, for a long time, offset the
losses resulting from the rudimentary type of economic life. In the third
place, the constant opening up of new lands for exploitation as a result
of conquest diverted capital and energy from Italian commerce and
industry. What there was of Roman capitalism disappeared as the
society of the Empire went into decline. City life and business fell away
and the economy reverted to an agrarian basis. Great landlords rose to
a position of supremacy, defied the law, created an agricultural anarchy
and, in this way, led Roman civilization into feudalism, which offered
no opportunity for the development of capitalistic institutions and prac-
tices.

In a general way the civilization and institutions of the Christian
Middle Ages were anti-capitalistic. The Christian theologians and law-
makers revived the Greek opposition to interest-taking, and both ethics
and commercial law condemned what are today fundamental bulwarks of
capitalistic enterprise: namely, monopoly, cornering the market, and the
exchange of goods purely for monetary profit. That fundamental eco-
nomic concept of the Middle Ages, the just price, was anti-capitalistic in
character.

Nevertheless, important foundations of early modern capitalism were
laid during the Middle Ages. The Jews assumed an important place as
money-lenders, and they introduced the use of letters of credit and rudi-
mentary bills of exchange. In time, a considerable number of Christian
money-lenders and bankers came into existence, especially in connection
with handling the vast resources and extensive financial operations of the
Catholic Church. The businessmen of the north Italian city-states in
the later Middle Ages not only brought into existence rudimentary bank-
ing and credit institutions but also standardized the currency. Banker-
merchants began to appear in the latter part of the twelfth century, and
a hundred years later the first banks of deposit were coming into being.
These were at first private banks, but early in the fifteenth century
public banks of deposit sprang up, particularly in Spain and Italy. In
these credit operations of the so-called Lombard bankers in Italy and
Caursine money-lenders in southern France, we find the origins of ideals
and practices that contributed notably to the rise of modern capitalism.

A survey of the contributions of the Italians to banking in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries shows that they were developing new
forms of credit, from business necessity and from the attempt to circum-
vent the prohibitions of the Church. Loans on mortgages, on a limited
partnership basis, on the security of bank deposits, or on specie were com-
ing into rather general use. At the same time the Italians, copying from
the Near East, introduced into the West letters of credit and payment,
and bills of exchange. These dispensed with cash payments, and they
also meant the introduction of what may be regarded as paper currency
into Europe. With the dawn of modern times in the sixteenth century,

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 119

the bank check and double-entry bookkeeping made their appearance.

A powerful philosophical and ethical impetus to capitalism came from
the Protestant Revolt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Look-
ing at the matter in the broad perspective of the history of civilization,
the most important contribution of the Protestant Revolt to economic
theory and practice was the sanction and respect it gave to the profit-
seeking motive in man. Not even in the period of oriental antiquity had
the acquisitive instinct been so frankly blessed. We have already seen
how the Greeks looked down upon economic life, when compared to the
glories of philosophy, art, and athletics, and how, in the scale of economic
activities, they rated commerce much lower than landholding — one step
above brigandage. The Roman aristocracy had this same general out-
look. Social respectability of the highest order was associated with
agriculture and the cultivation of rural estates. We quoted from Cicero,
gome pages back, to illustrate the contempt of the cultivated Roman for
both commercial pursuits and the workshop.

The medieval Christians brought a revolution in human attitudes
towards work and industry by upholding the worthy character of manual
labor and especially blessing competent craftsmanship. The skilled
worker was no longer contemptible. But the medieval Church empha-
sized the penitential nature of work, looked askance upon the profit
system, and tried to eliminate from trade those things which today would
be regarded as the very essence of shrewd business — selling at a profit with
no social service, cornering the market, monopolizing products, and inter-
est-taking. Christians involved in medieval trade may have engaged to
some degree in all these prohibited practices, but the Church never for-
mally gave its approval to such conduct.

The Protestant Revolt fully removed the stigma from personal enrich-
ment through commercial pursuits, glorified trade and monetary profits,
and laid the foundations for our present near-deification of the business-
man. Protestantism, especially Calvinism, decisively encouraged indi-
vidualism in economics as well as in religion. It promoted the spirit of
thrift and economic ambition, the acquisition of wealth through shrewd
dealings, and increased freedom in all forms of economic operations.
The modern theory and practice of "business enterprise" found a power-
ful initial support in Protestant morality and economic doctrine. This
helped along the rise of the new bourgeoisie or middle class.

The true origins of capitalism are to be found in the expansion of
Europe, the Commercial Revolution, and the rise of a new volume of
trade and industry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will
now summarize the more salient points of capitalism and then indicate
the way in which these essentials of capitalism came into being in the
two or three centuries after Columbus.

The outstanding traits and practices of capitalism are the following:
(1) The desire for private profit rather than the service of the com-
munity or mankind; (2) the rise of a money economy, which promoted
the freedom of partners in all kinds of economic relations, the dissocia-

120 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

tion of objects from the person of the owner, the depersonalization and
rationalization of economic relations, and the habit of calculation in
economic affairs; (3) the estimation of social status and success in terms
of relative monetary resources; (4) the evaluation of goods and services
in terms of prices set by bargaining in the market rather than by con-
siderations of justice or intrinsic worth; (5) the accumulation of large
monetary resources for investment in business ventures; (6) the exist-
ence of a free market for the sale of goods; (7) the presence of a sufficient
labor market to produce the needed laborers; (8) a credit system ade-
quate to the needs of the economic era; (9) a reasonably thorough devel-
opment of commercial and industrial life; and (10) unrestricted dominion
of private property in lands and goods. Viewed broadly, capitalism has
as its purpose the gaining of private profit, its method is that of free
competition, its spirit that of private initiative, and its field of operation,
the free market.

We have already noted how the Protestant Revolt broke down the
medieval emphasis on the social use of wealth and extolled the economic
and ethical virtues of accumulating private profits through business en-
terprise.

For a long time, social status reflected former agrarian values, and the
newly-rich as a social class did not have the same prestige as the old
agrarian aristocracy. But by the eighteenth century wealth had come
to bestow not only economic power but social prestige, especially when
the wealthy business and commercial classes bought up great landed
estates. By the nineteenth century one's place in society was pretty
directly related to his monetary holdings, and high social position de-
pended upon capacity to make a lavish display of wealth.

The Protestant Revolt and early modern business and commercial
practices wiped out the medieval limitations upon the free purchase and
sale of goods and encouraged free bargaining in the market. It became
one's ethical and legal privilege to buy as cheaply as possible and to sell
for as much as he could get, even though nothing was added to the value
of the commodity. The idea of the "just price" withered away.

In early modern times, great fortunes were accumulated by families
which had engaged for years in money-lending and rudimentary bank-
ing. Such were the Peruzzi and Medici of Italy, and the Fuggers of
South Germany. The financial resources accumulated by these and
other less well-known families provided a material basis for the more
extensive investments required after the growth of overseas trade and
the expansion of industry needed to support this trade.

The market for goods in the Middle Ages had been rigidly controlled
by many practices and groups. The gilds and local market regulations
sharply restricted the operations of the local markets. The regional and
national market, provided by the medieval fairs, was also subjected to
strict regulations imposed by Church ethics, gild regulations, the law
merchant, and royal ordinances. In early modern times, these restric-
tions of the market were slowly but surely swept away and relative free-

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 121

dom was given in the sale of goods. Under the Mercantilist system, the
main restrictions upon a free market were the limitations imposed upon
sales of goods by colonies, but in home countries a free market generally
prevailed, though not so absolute as it became in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when laissez-faire principles had fully triumphed.

The destruction of the medieval manor and the ousting of the serfs
therefrom provided a large, mobile, and helpless labor supply, which
provided all the workers necessary to produce goods under the new
putting-out system. The gradual breaking-down of the gild system put
an end to this medieval monopoly over the labor market.

The growth of large fortunes, the extension of business enterprise, the
opportunity for more extensive investment and profits, together with the
growing experience with credit institutions and banks in the late Middle
Ages, gave an enormous impetus to the improvement of banking in early
modern times and created a system of money and credit adequate to the
needs of the expanding business and commerce. The conventional com-
mercial paper, such as promissory notes, drafts, checks, and bills of ex-
change, came into wider use and facilitated new business ventures.

The opportunities for gain which were revealed by exploration and
colonization led to a notable expansion of commerce. New commodities
were brought into Europe from overseas, while colonials and natives pro-
vided a new market for European manufacturers. This expansion of
business activity laid a substantial foundation for the growth of modern
capitalism and encouraged its practices and policies. The latter were
blessed by Protestanism, especially by calvinists, who denounced idle-
ness, praised industry, and regarded business as a divine calling.

During the Middle Ages, property had been in part communal and
was based upon a complex system of personal and legal relationships.2
With the breakdown of the manors and the gilds and the destruction of
feudalism, there gradually came into being an unrestricted system of
private property. This was praised by religion, defended by law, and
nourished by business. In early modern times, the direct responsibility
of private ownership for business profits tended to make private prop-
erty a dynamic impulse to industrial development.

We have now briefly listed some of the more important contributions
to the rise of capitalism through the ages. By the seventeenth century,
the capitalistic system had come into existence. It was a late arrival
on the human scene. Over 99 per cent of man's existence on the planet
had been passed through before capitalism appeared. Further, capital-
ism did not come into full bloom until the nineteenth century. Not until
then were private fortunes large enough to give capitalism full reach or
was economic freedom sufficient to provide fully for that cornerstone of
capitalism — the free market. The strong and extensive state control
which characterized the Mercantilist system of politics and economics
held over until the nineteenth century.

2 See below, pp. 174-176.

122 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

The Evolution of Capitalism

It is misleading to describe capitalism exclusively in terms of any
single stage of its development, to envisage as a unified whole a system
of economic life covering the period from the Fuggers of the fifteenth
century to the Morgans of the twentieth. Capitalism can be intelli-
gently understood only when analyzed according to its periods of evolu-
tion, each of which had distinctive characteristics. The most accurate
portrayal of the evolution of modern capitalism conceives of it as having
already passed through four main successive stages: (1) mercantile or
pre-industrial capitalism; (2) early industrial capitalism; (3) monopolis-
tic industrial capitalism; and (4) finance capitalism. State capitalism
may be the next stage.

Pre-industrial capitalism developed between the Commercial and In-
dustrial revolutions — between 1500 and 1750, Society was still primarily
agricultural, and the rising capitalistic activities were chiefly associated
with the growing world trade following the overseas discoveries, and
with the small manufacturing units operating under either the gild or
the putting-out system. The merchants were the masters of capitalism
in this era. Their fortunes were built up chiefly out of the new trade,
and capitalistic institutions and practices were created mainly to serve
commerce.

Early industrial capitalism prevailed during the preliminary stages of
the first Industrial Revolution, and was associated with the rise of the
machine technique, the factory system, urban industrial life, and im-
provements in transportation resulting from the application of the steam
engine. The industrialists were the chief capitalists; they owned and
operated their own plants and kept finance subordinate to industry.
Absentee ownership was not important.

Monopolistic industrial capitalism was primarily associated with the
earlier phases of the second Industrial Revolution, which demonstrated
the superior efficiency of large industrial establishments and mass pro-
duction. It was greatly aided by the development of the corporate form
of business organization and the rise of trusts. Bold and unscrupulous
men attempted to obtain control of entire industries, to profit by the
introduction of labor-saving devices and large-scale production, and to
fix prices at a high level. Ownership was not, however, even yet di-
vorced to any great extent from management. The industrial giants of
those days still maintained an active personal control over their expand-
ing empires of industry. Railroad development was, however, thoroughly
shot through with financial chicanery and speculative enterprise. It was
here that finance capitalism bored from within.

In finance capitalism, the investment banker replaced the industrialist
as the controlling figure in economic life. The process of industrial
consolidation launched by monopoly capitalism continued, but was di-
rected by investment bankers rather than by industrialists. The holding
company replaced the outlawed trusts. Control and management were

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 123

both increasingly divorced from ownership, and absentee ownership be-
came all but universal. This has been one of the outstanding revolutions
produced by finance capitalism. Productivity and human service, as
dominating economic motives, were supplanted by the desire for large
and immediate financial profits through speculative manipulations, the
latter often being definitely opposed to the permanent welfare of the
industries and transportation systems involved.

It is now pretty generally conceded by impartial students of economic
and social history that finance capitalism is drawing to an end and that
the next stage — perhaps the final stage — of capitalism will be state capi-
talism, in which the government will furnish most of the credit, will
own many basic industries and transportation agencies, and will exert
extensive control over all forms of economic life. In Europe today, state
capitalism dominates nearly every country except the Soviet Union.
It has attained its most extreme development in such Fascist states as
Italy and Germany. But in a less complete form it had become well
established in the Scandinavian states and Finland before the second
World War broke out. As the result of the emergency created by the
second World War, France and Britain had to adopt a complete system
of state capitalism, while German conquests brought a number of new
countries under the dominion of the Nazi form of state capitalism. In
some ways it is a misnomer to call such a system "state capitalism," for
it suppresses the most conspicuous element in capitalism, namely, the free
market, and it also greatly restricts private property.

Many historians believe that when state capitalism becomes well de-
veloped it will bring an end to all forms of capitalism and will pass over
naturally into a system of state socialism, like that which exists in Soviet
Russia. The Nazi economic order today has moved ahead towards col-
lectivism to such an extent that it does not differ markedly from the
Russian economic system, so far as the state control of economic life is
concerned.

If we apply this conception of the stages of capitalistic evolution to the
United States, for example, the era of mercantile or pre-industrial capi-
talism falls between the period of settlement and the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. Dominated by colonial merchants, this period had,
as its outstanding figures in commercial capitalism, John Hancock,
Peter Faneuil, the Whartons of Philadelphia, the Livingstons of New
York, and the Browns of Providence.

Beginning around 1800, machine methods were introduced into the
New England cotton textile industry by Samuel Slater and others ; trans-
portation was revolutionized by canals, river steamboats, and railroads;
modern methods of making iron and steel were developed by William
Kelley and others ; and the factory system became rather general. Lead-
ing figures in this stage of capitalism were the textile barons, Nathan
Appleton, Francis Cabot Lowell, and William Crompton; the ironmasters,
William Kelley and Thaddeus Stevens; the manufacturer, Cyrus McCor-
miak; the railroad promoter, J. M. Forbes; and Philip Armour, the meat-
packer.

124 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

Industrial capitalism was tremendously stimulated by the Civil War.
Andrew Carnegie, the ironmaster, was the outstanding representative of
well-developed industrial capitalism. No definite date marks the deci-
sive end of this stage of capitalism. Henry Ford may probably be re-
garded as motivated by the ideals of industrial capitalism, equipped with
the technique afforded by the second Industrial Revolution, and operat-
ing somewhat defiantly in a world generally dominated by finance cap-
italism. The anomalous character of Ford's ideals, however commend-
able, have often been commented upon by historians and economists.
What we have just said offers the explanation.

The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a sweeping
transformation in capitalistic processes and ideals. The chief objective
was to concentrate industrial power, in order to obtain the advantages
of large-scale production and monopoly prices. The most representative
figure of this period was John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and the Standard Oil
Company was the most conspicuous and successful product of monopoly
capitalism in this country. Other examples were the United States Steel
Corporation, the International Harvester Company, and the American
Tobacco Company. Monopolistic capitalism was at first brought about
through the use of trusts, but these were outlawed by the Sherman
Act of 1890. After this date the holding company was invented. It has
been fairly successful in keeping beyond the reaches of the law.

In the United States the age of finance capitalism overlaps the terminal
period of monopoly capitalism. Indeed, the finance capitalists continued
monopolistic practices. The holding company, the most spectacular
product of finance capitalism, became the main instrument of monopolis-
tic control and exploitation. The formation of the United States Steel
Corporation at the opening of the twentieth century was as much the
work of a banker, J. P. Morgan, as of the industrialists, Carnegie,
Schwab, Frick, and others. In the era of finance capitalism, great bank-
ing combines were created and investment banks assumed increasing
control over the origin and operation of manufacturing industries, min-
ing, transportation, electric utilities, and insurance companies. If the
elder Rockefeller was typical of the period of monopoly capitalism, J. P.
Morgan, Sr., was the outstanding figure in the triumph of finance capi-
talism. Other leading banking concerns were Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Dillon,
Read & Co., Lee Higginson & Co., and great metropolitan national banks
such as the Chase National Bank and the National City Bank of New
York. Descendants of monopoly capitalists often assumed a prominent
position in the age of finance capitalism. For example, the younger
Rockefeller has a controlling interest in the Chase National Bank, the
greatest public banking establishment in the United States.

It must not be supposed that the financiers' control of legitimate busi-
ness was limited to the giant investment houses and manipulators we
have just enumerated. There were lesser J. P. Morgans, Samuel Insulls,
Albert Wiggins, Charles E. Mitchells, and Clarence Dillons in every
sizable city and town who, in a small way, attempted to do what these

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 125

men did on a national scale. Moreover, they were aided by the big
metropolitan financial houses, which unloaded on the smaller banks their
less desirable securities. The latter in turn sold them to trusting clients
with disastrous results to both the American masses and to our banking
system.

The growth of great banking institutions, together with the vast wealth
which they concentrated, naturally made them the pivots of finance
capitalism. We must keep in mind the fact that the banks themselves,
like industries and transportation lines, have been combined into gigantic
institutions and have accumulated immense deposits.

In order that finance capitalism might reach full expression, it was
necessary that the banks should gain control over industry, transporta-
tion, mining, and electric utilities. All of these require extensive credit,
and the banks dominated the credit facilities of the country. Moreover,
newly formed companies must have banking aid to underwrite and float
their securities. Established companies need similar help when they
plan activities requiring the flotation of new issues of corporate paper.
When a company goes into a receivership, a great banking house may
supervise the reorganization, usually emerging with fairly complete con-
trol of the reorganized company. In these ways nearly all forms of
American business and transportation have fallen into the grip of the
great American banks, private and public.

The Ascendency of Finance Capitalism

The actual character of finance capitalism in the United States
today can best be illustrated by a brief summary of the relevant facts.
The total national wealth of the country before the 1929 slump amounted
to some 367 billion dollars. Of this total, business wealth may be
assigned around 210 billions. Some 78 per cent of all business wealth —
165 billions — was corporate wealth. This was divided among some
300,000 non-financial corporations (that is, excluding banks and the like) .
The concentration of this corporate wealth under the management of a
few individuals is almost incredible to all except students of recent Amer-
ican economic history. Two hundred of the largest corporations, repre-
senting only 0.7 per cent of the total number of corporations, in 1932
controlled 81 billion dollars — namely, about half of all corporate assets,
35 per cent of all business wealth, and nearly 20 per cent of our total
national wealth.8

Within each of these great corporations there is a high degree of con-
centration of control. This literal control is rarely based upon the
actual ownership of a majority of the stock. In fact, only ten of these
200 super-corporations are controlled by owners of a majority of the
stock. And these are relatively small corporations, since the ten control

3 The concentration of control is even greater today, and the formal assets of the
200 super-corporations are larger.

126 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

only 2 per cent of the total assets of the 200 corporations. This divorce
of control from investment and ownership is at times amazing. The
Van Sweringens gained control over eight Class A railroads, with assets
of more than 2 billion dollars, on the basis of an original investment of
only 2 million, nearly all of which was borrowed from a Cleveland bank.
This was then expanded to 20 million dollars by various subsequent
manipulative transactions. Henry L. Doherty and his associates con-
trolled the Cities Service utility interests, with about one billion dollars
in paper assets, through the unbelievably small investment of one mil-
lion in preferred voting-stock. Likewise, an investment of one million
dollars has given control over the one billion paper assets of the Stand-
ard Gas and Electric Company.

This is only part of the story. Among these 200 corporations there
were 43 with assets of more than 500 million dollars each at the begin-
ning of 1932. These are controlled by 166 individuals, who serve as
interlocking directors between the 43 corporations, ten leading banks,
and three great insurance companies. In fact, the ten banks and three
insurance companies control, in practice, not only the 43 corporations,
but all one billion dollar corporations of the country, with but one ex-
ception: the Ford Motor Company, which is controlled through the
ownership of a majority of the stock.

The pivotal organization in this growth of financial concentration and
dominion is the firm of J. P. Morgan & Co. This company directly
influences, through interlocking directorates, enterprises with more than
20 billion dollars in assets. We shall shortly consider the effect of this
financial dominion on economic life.

While we must point out the defects in the philosophy of irresponsible
business enterprise, we must also, to be fair and accurate, indicate that
the greater part of such sound business as we once had has been under-
mined by the methods of finance capitalism.

Most attacks on the modern industrial order are lacking in discrimina-
tion and emphasis. We frequently assault modern "business," lumping
in the term not only actual business pursuits but also speculative finance,
which is really the major enemy of legitimate business. It is quite true,
as we shall see later on, that modern business enterprise leaves much to
be desired. Nevertheless, it has provided those products which enable
us to live in a manner quite different from primitive man. Modern
business may be unscientific, and harsh with labor, and may have ex-
ploited the inventors, but after all, its creations, even though their
quality might be improved in most cases, are the most impressive of
man's economic achievements. That they may prove self-destructive is
another matter.

Modern finance is a different story. But even here we are in danger
of indiscriminate abuse. Legitimate banking, which supplies our invest-
ment and credit machinery, renders an indispensable service to modern
industrial life. Without it, large-scale business, with its increased ef-
ficiency and productivity, could not exist. Banking and finance, which

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 127

should be the servants of business, have unfortunately become its master
in the United States. The investment and credit functions have be-
come incidental to speculative exploitation.

In the United States there has been no such extreme development of
state capitalism as we find in Europe. But the depression of 1929 and
thereafter has headed this country definitely in the direction of state
capitalism. The government has adopted extensive control over bank-
ing and credit and has imposed restrictions upon the operations of
finance capitalism. It has put the force of the state behind labor organi-
zations. It has tended to fix prices and to attack monopoly. It has
asserted extensive control over agriculture. Great sums have been
raised to care for the needy through relief and public works, the total
cost amounting to about fourteen billion dollars during Mr. Roosevelt's
first two administrations. With the adoption of the vast preparedness
program of 1940-1941, the government asserted even more extensive
control over finance and business, with the prospect of complete state
capitalism after our entry into the second World War. The vast ex-
penditures for defense — upwards of a hundred billion dollars — are likely
to encourage an ever more complete system of state capitalism to deal
with the difficult economic problems which lie ahead. Nine weeks of war
subjected American business to a greater degree of state control than nine
years of the New Deal were able to accomplish.

Some Defects in the System of Finance Capitalism

Though the net effect of financial dominion over capitalism has been
disastrous, as we shall make clear in some detail, one should not over-
look the fact that investment bankers can render a real service to busi-
ness and have at times actually done so in some respects and cases. In
ideal theory, as N. S. B. Gras has explained, investment bankers may
render the following services to the business world: 4 They make possible
the expansion of business and the creation of new companies by under-
writing the sale of securities needed to finance plant expansion or the
establishment of new business. They arrange long-term loans for busi-
ness, in the same way that commercial banks provide for short-term
loans. Since businesses could, before recent innovations, be started and
expanded only through the aid of the investment banks, the latter can
exert a restraining influence upon wild investment in new plants or upon
unwise expansion of existing plants. Further, through their domination
over business, they can select corporate officers and managers of busi-
ness enterprises and thus bring about wise and efficient business manage-
ment for the benefit of stockholders and the public alike. In these ways,
investment banks and financial capitalists might have a benevolent and
efficient control over all modern business.

4 See Gras, "Do We Need Private Bankers?" New York Times Current History,
August, 1933. Professor Gras' apology for finance capitalism is elaborated in his
Business and Capitalism, Crofts, 1939.

128 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

In practice, these benefits have been very imperfectly realized. The
investment banks have, indeed, financed new enterprises and plant expan-
sion, though usually at enormous profits to themselves. But they have
rarely exerted any other beneficial effects upon business. Instead of
restraining unwise and unneeded enterprise and plant expansion, they
have all too often encouraged such rashness, in order to get the profits
connected therewith. They have chosen corporate directors and man-
agement, but usually for the purpose of having docile puppets who will
aid in looting business rather than administer it with integrity and
efficiency. Instead of increasing the efficiency of corporate administra-
tion, the investment banks have more frequently demoralized it through
internal financial manipulations. To facilitate and extend this pro-
cedure they have created great holding companies, which loot and drain
the profits from manufacturing enterprise, railroads, utility companies,
and the like.

That this is not an exaggeration can be seen from a careful reading of
Max LowenthaPs The Investor Pays,5 a not extreme case history of
finance capitalism at its best in operation — the case of the Chicago,
Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. This describes the experience of the
St. Paul Railroad under the domination of one of the best investment
banking houses, that of Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Indeed, Mr. Otto
Kahn of this company testified before an investigating committee in
Washington that he and his company dealt with the St. Paul as a kindly
family physician would deal with the sick wife of a personal friend. The
ravishing carried on by more ruthless investment banking houses has
often been quite incredible to those not familiar with the practices and
policies of finance capitalism.

A brief summary of some characteristic operations of finance capital-
ism will illustrate its fundamental antagonism to honest practice. The
formula and technique of finance capitalism, with minor variations in
individual cases, seem to be essentially the following:

A new enterprise is proposed, either to or by a great investment bank-
ing house. Little or no concern is shown for the community's need of
this enterprise, be it a power plant, a shoe factory, or a transcontinental
railroad. Rather, the question is wholly whether the securities of the
proposed corporation can be floated profitably. If they can, the invest-
ment bankers market the securities at a handsome profit to themselves
and with little conscience about the amount of water thrown into the
initial capitalization.

Then the actual plant, transportation system, or utility, as the case
may be, is built at an unnecessarily high cost, the financiers almost al-
ways profiting through their connections with construction and supply
companies.

When the plant is built and business starts, there is a period of gross

0 Knopf, 1933. See the excellent review by G. C. Means in The New York Times,
June 25, 1933.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 129

mismanagement and extravagance. Much of this is due to the control
of the corporation by directors who, in one way or another, can, as we
shall make clear later, make greater profits for themselves by such mis-
management than by earning large dividends for stockholders. They
own only a small portion of stock, so they get only a fraction of the
dividends, but they get all of the proceeds from their inside exploitation.
Not even the insistence of the stockholders upon getting dividends suf-
fices adequately to check this tendency. Moreover, the stockholders
are usually kept in the dark about corporate finances until a receivership
is inevitable. As Alden Winthrop has pointed out: "It is no exaggeration
to say that it is difficult to find one out of ten corporate reports which
is complete, clear and fundamentally honest; and probably there is not
one out of five which is not misleading, ambiguous, vague, or evasive."8

Mismanagement eventually leads to a receivership. The controlling
insiders and their bankers get together and decide upon the steps to be
taken. Security holders are usually lulled into a false sense of con-
fidence by optimistic rumors, lest they become panicky and take action
which would delay or frustrate the reorganization plans of the controlling
clique. A friendly judge is found who will appoint receivers and com-
mittees favorable to those directing the reorganization. The mass of
small investors are then saddled with great losses, while the insiders gain
control of the reorganized concern at relatively small cost. The stock
holder has only a substantial or a total loss to show for the hard-earned
funds he invested.7

In the meantime, the company's service to the public is an incidental
matter compared to the financial profit which the insiders make from
underwriting, construction, mismanagement, and reorganization. Like-
wise, the market value of the stock — which should be determined by
prudent investment and earning power — is often controlled by stock ex-
change manipulations, the stock exchange itself being supported and
managed by speculative bankers.

Launch, mismanage, wreck, and reorganize are, then, quite literally,
the slogan of finance capitalism. Between the first and last of these
processes, as many speculative gains as possible are extracted from the
company. Hence, wage cuts and other savings at the expense of mass
purchasing power are favored. Professor Ripley has trenchantly sum-
marized the results:

A multitude of people — a horde of bewildered investors — has little left in
the world but ashes and aloes. These are all that remain of the precious fruits
of years of pelf-denial and of hard labor. A raid upon the thrift and industry,
which lie at the very roots of our orderly civilization and culture, has been, and

« Are You a Stockholder? Covici-Friede, 1937, p. 13.

7 That this analysis of the operations of finance capitalism is not overdrawn is
evident from the careful works of Lowenthal, Berle and Means, Flynn, Wormser,
and others. But even more cogent is the reported observation of Paul D. Cravath,
one of the greatest of corporation lawyers, that in twenty years he has witnessed
over half of the important American corporations pass through receivership.

130 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

still is, under way. This is becoming steadily more and more apparent as we
set about clearing up the slash after the great timber cut of 1929.8

The speculative and exploitive policies of finance capitalism are made
possible by absentee ownership, the divorce of control from ownership,
and the mechanism of the holding company, which enables a few insiders
to gain control of great corporations with a small investment of capital.
As John T. Flynn has cogently observed, "The holding companies are the
machine guns of the financial racketeers/1

We have moved a great distance from the days when the individual
manufacturer owned his plant and managed his property, thoroughly
disciplined by a sense of personal responsibility. Today, those who
manage our industrial enterprises are usually two degrees removed from
actual ownership. The owners are the stockholders, usually extremely
numerous and widely scattered. Those who control the ultimate policy
of industrial enterprises and of particular plants are the corporate of-
ficers and directors. As we shall see, they rarely own more than an
insignificant fraction of the total stock of the corporation. They get
control of the concern by owning a small and coherent block of voting
securities, by issuing non-voting stock, and by other methods of legal
legerdemain. While this group controls corporations, it usually has little
to do with the actual management of manufacturing plants and other
business details. These duties and responsibilities are handed over to
technically trained business managers, usually graduates of our ever
improving schools of business administration. But these business man-
agers find that their scientific ideals and efficiency precepts are all too
often violated by the policies of the officers and directors, who succumb
to speculative impulses and exploitive ambitions.

Today, it is unusual for the governing clique of a great corporation to
own as much as 5 per cent of its stock. But suppose we grant, for the
sake of illustration, that they do own 5 per cent. Let us assume that
they are industrious, work hard and do everything they can to increase
legitimate dividends. What do they get as their reward? They obtain
5 per cent of the total dividends, since they own only 5 per cent of the
stock. On the other hand, if they hire an eminent corporation lawyer to
tell them how they can increase their profits through financial manipula-
tion and still keep out of jail, what is their reward? They get 100 per cent
of the profits, since the whole manipulative process is exclusively in their
hands. At the worst, they will be saddled with only 5 per cent of the
losses, since they own only 5 per cent of the stock, and any assessment
would be limited to that amount.

Therefore, honesty and industry are rewarded at the best by 5 per
cent of the income, while, at the very worst, chicanery is repaid with
95 per cent of its profits. Hence, it is no wonder that, human nature
and the profit motive being what they are, the governing cliques under

8 W. 2. Ripley, "Our Corporate Revolution and Its Perils/' The New York Times,
July 24. 1932.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 131

the regime of finance capitalism prefer dishonesty and 95 per cent of
the manipulative profits rather than honesty and industriousness and
5 per cent of the dividends. Such abuses are almost inevitable when
people handle things which do not belong to them. It is the penalty we
pay for allowing our corporate directors to use "other people's money,"
to employ Mr. Justice Brandeis* phrase, without proper restrictions and
safeguards.

In addition to financial manipulation and deliberate mismanagement,
another way in which the governing clique of insiders enrich themselves
at the expense of stockholders is through excessive salaries and bonuses.0
Salaries running from $100,000 to $300,000 a year are not uncommon.
One special form of salary graft is the creation of a number of perfunc-
tory vice-presidents who often do little or nothing and, yet, receive large
salaries. Even more reprehensible is the bonus system when carried to
the excesses which have been revealed. During the first ten years that
the bonus system was in force in one large corporation, bonuses were paid
to officials to the amount of approximately $32,000,000, as againsjb only
$41,000,000 paid out to all the common stockholders during this period.
Indeed, in 1925-28, when not a cent of dividends was paid to common
stockholders, nearly $7,000,000 was paid out in bonuses to officials.

Finance capitalism also accustoms the public to regard the securities
of corporations as paper, to be used in institutionalized gambling on the
stock exchange. Attention is concentrated on the possibility of specula-
tive profits in financial manipulation rather than on the assurance of
steady earnings on bona-fide capitalization. Industry has been further
jeopardized through the tendency of finance capitalism to encourage ex-
cessive investment in plants. Money may be made for a time through
floating the securities of new companies, in spite of an overcrowding of
producers in a particular industry. The ultimate result, however, is
overproduction, glutted markets, and finally factories abandoned or run-
ning on part time, and other symptoms of industrial decline. In real
estate, finance capitalism encourages building out of all proportion to
actual needs. Investment companies may earn large immediate profits
by selling mortgage bonds on new structures, even though these build-
ings, when erected, may have few or no tenants and will soon pass into
bankruptcies and receiverships, saddling the owners of these bonds with
heavy or total losses.

Finance capitalism has all but wrecked our transportation and electric
utility systems. In its earliest phases, it encouraged overinvestment in
canals. Then came the fifty-year period in which railroads were viewed
by men like Jay Gould and Daniel Drew more as gambling machines
than as transportation systems. But little or nothing was learned from
the disastrous experience of the railroads with finance capitalism. The
same methods were applied on a grander and more disastrous scale in
our electric utility industry. The results were fully illustrated by the

9 See J. T. Flynn, Graft in Business, Vanguard, 1931, Chapter VIII.

132 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

collapse of the Insull empire in 1932 and the Associated Gas and Electric
Company in 1940. Insull and Hopson were only conspicuous examples.
Most fundamental of all the evils of finance capitalism, probably, is
the antagonism of finance capitalism to the provision of that mass pur-
chasing power upon which the very existence of our economic system
depends. The speculative profits of finance capitalism are almost in-
variably derived by methods which deplete mass purchasing power.
Finance capitalism takes the cream of the profits off every enterprise
that it finances, "siphons out" the earnings and resources of these busi-
nesses, and drains the proceeds into the pockets of the bankers, under-
writers, and security manipulators, to the disadvantage of wage earners
in these industries. It also gouges their security-holders and, all too
frequently, leaves the industry or organization "financed" unable to func-
tion efficiently for any considerable period of time. It need hardly be
pointed out that those who get the profits are the least needy class in
society and they contribute almost nothing to mass purchasing power.
Conspicuous also has been the depression of the farmers, aggravated in
many cases by financial control over farm mortgages and markets:

It is only beginning to be dimly recognized that in a plenty economy there is
and must be between the interests of business and those of finance an irrepres-
sible conflict. The normal processes of finance are poisonous to business.
Finance causes instability. One way to make financial profits is to wait until
business starts to be profitable, and then lend money to someone to set up a
competing plant. Then when everybody naturally goes bankrupt, the lender gets
the property, and if recovery ever docs take place, he is in on the ground floor.
Business pays the cost. Another way is to buy securities when they threaten
to go up, and hold them so that they will go up, and sell them when they
threaten to go down, and sell short so as to help them go down. Business pays
the cost. A third way to get financial profits is to set up an investment trust or
a holding company that is so complicated that the small investor cannot see just
how he is to be rooked. When his investment is gone, he becomes a poor cus-
tomer for legitimate business. A fourth way is to take a commission from a
foreign government for selling bonds to people who ask their banker for dis-
interested advice. In any case, business pays the costs either in rising overhead
or falling sales or both. Businass needs stability to prosper, finance gets its
profits from instability . . . Over this conflict of interest there must be a battle,
because, so long as finance dominates business, both are headed for the precipice,
and finance will not loose its grip without a fight. The question whether they
will go over the edge together will be settled by whether business has the vitality
to rouse itself and muster the power to reduce finance to its proper place as
the servant of production. . . .

About one more shot of that kind of thing (the poison administered by finance
to business before 1929), and it is hard to see how it will be possible to avoid
the final collapse of our social order. The crossroads of history will be the place
where we do or do not develop means for keeping money out of Wall Street and
making it travel up and down Main Street where it belongs. No country has
ever got out of a depression without some kind of expansion. The important
thing to keep in mind now is that if the expansion is applied to the buying end
it will not necessarily kill the patient.10

10 David Cushman Coyle, The Irrepressible Conflict: Business versus Finance,
privately printed, pp. 37 ff.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 133

These are relevant observations, if we remember that when Mr. Coyle
speaks of finance he means present-day speculative finance. No sane
person can question the enormous service rendered by legitimate finan-
cial institutions to business.

There have been a number of other disastrous results from the policies
and practices of finance capitalism that deserve at least passing mention
in this place. In the first place, we may mention the undermining of
the stability of American banks, as the result of the domination of bank
practices by speculative ideals. Between 1920 and the beginning of
1933, there were about 11,000 bank failures in the United States, leaving
only 18,800 banks open to do business on the eve of the bank holiday.
The deposits involved in these bank failures amounted to approximately
5 billion dollars. There are fewer valid reasons for bank failures in the
United States than in any other civilized country. This is so because
of our vast wealth and resources and the possibility of making large
bank profits through legitimate forms of banking enterprise. Had our
bankers been willing to accept reasonable profits, there would have been
no reason whatever for them to take such chances as they did on highly
speculative ventures. Their responsibility for our bank failures is well
illustrated by comparison with conditions in Canada and Great Britain.
In Canada, the difficulties of banking are far greater than in the United
States because of the smaller population, its scattered character, and the
vast area involved. There is no such opportunity for legitimate bank-
ing gains in Canada as there is in this country. But Canadian bankers
stuck to banking, and there has been only one bank failure in Canada
since 1914, and this was a relatively small one involving liabilities of not
more than $20,000,000. There has not been a bank failure in England
in contemporary times. Some improvement in our shaky banking sys-
tem was brought about by the New Deal legislation of 1933-34, but the
system was patched up rather than thoroughly overhauled.

Extremely ominous and difficult to reduce is the staggering burden of
debt that finance capitalism has piled up as a result of its encourage-
ment of overconstruction, its promotion of installment buying, and its
backing of wildcat speculation. It is quite possible that these lines of
action will pull down the whole capitalistic system unless a very exten-
sive "write-off" is effected — something that our finance capitalists will
resist to the last.

The long-term public and private debts in the United States amounted
to 134 billions at the end of 1932. The short-term debts amounted to
approximately 104 billions. This made a total of 238 billion dollars.
Obviously there was only a very slight margin between debts and total
national wealth, which is variously estimated by experts today as some-
where between 200 and 300 billion dollars. It is, therefore, quite ap-
parent that far the greater proportion of our national wealth is pledged
to meet credit obligations incurred in the past.

The debt menace still hangs over us. The Roosevelt policies have
only postponed the day of reckoning. The public debt has developed by

134 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

leaps and bounds since 1932. And the methods of finance capitalism
which have created and rapidly extended the current debt structure have
not been altered in any fundamental way. The national debt increased
from 14.4 billions in 1930 to over 100 billions in 1942. State and local
debts increased from 16.9 billions in 1929 to 17.8 billions in 1937. The
total debt burden of the country in 1937 was estimated to be over 250
billion dollars. It is far over 300 billions today.

Another important item to be considered is the relationship of debt to
production. The capitalistic system is relatively safe only when there
is a definite and fixed one-to-one relationship between the growth of
debt and the growth of production. In his ultra-scientific volume on
Debt and Production, an able engineer, Bassett Jones, points out that
this safe relationship has not existed in the United States since 1910.
The curve of production growth has fallen off ever since that time, while
the curve of debt growth has increased at an alarming rate. The re-
sult is that today our productive system cannot support more than one
sixth of the capital claims that have been piling up against it for the last
twenty years. The implications of this situation are staggering.

A very disastrous influence of finance capitalism upon business in the
way of lessening the relative income of productive business, cutting down
the income of producers — farmers and industrialists alike — decreasing
the income going into wages and salaries, increasing living costs and thus
reducing mass purchasing power, is to be detected in the amazing in-
crease of overhead costs since the first World War. Overhead costs com-
prise all charges of any sort involved in moving goods from the producers
— factories or farms — to the ultimate consumers, and in distributing
them to the latter. The total cost of operating all of our national in-
dustrial plant in 1917 was approximately equal to the cost of operating
it in 1932. Yet the cost of overhead increased by no less than 230 per
cent during those fifteen years. In 1917, when producers received $1
for raising food or manufacturing consumers' goods, those who were
engaged in the various overhead operations received $1 also. Today,
for every dollar that goes to producers no less than $2.30 goes into over-
heatf charges. For example, every consumer pays 62 cents out of every
dollar of living costs for overhead charges on his necessities of life.
This increase of overhead has been due, in part, to the creation of hold-
ing companies, and the like, that render little or no practical service in
producing goods or in moving them to the consumers, but which do
impose a vast charge upon society in order to pay dividends to these
companies. Advertising is another source of large overhead costs.

Walter Rautenstrauch has indicated the enviable condition that would
exist if overhead costs had not been inflated in the period since 1917: ll

1. We would need 12,300,000 more producers;

2. And no more overheaders ;

Who Gets the Money t Harper, 1934, p. 48.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 135

3. And an increase in the producers' income of 56 per cent over its
1932 level;

4. And an increase in the fanners' income of 216 per cent over its
1932 level

It is obvious that this inordinate increase of overhead charges played
a large role in causing the economic depression of 1929, decreasing the
purchasing power of the mass of Americans, and bringing capitalistic
society to its knees. There will be little chance of rehabilitating capital-
ism until this condition is corrected. It is true that there are many
engaged in overhead services who receive modest incomes and contribute
to the purchasing power of the country. But most of the overhead goes
to relatively parasitic super-corporations and holding companies and
the rich at the top of the economic pyramid, who neither can nor will
spend any large proportion of their incomes.

The operations of American finance capitalism outside of our own
country have been just about as disastrous to the mass of American
investors. These operations are usually known as financial imperialism.
After the first World War, American investments abroad increased
greatly. In 1913, our foreign investments amounted to about 2.5 bil-
lion dollars. We owed abroad nearly twice this amount. After 1914,
the situation changed markedly. A large part of our foreign indebted-
ness was canceled against payments for war materials. The American
public bought widely, optimistically, and indiscriminately almost any
foreign securities offered, and American companies made heavy invest-
ments in plant and equipment, particularly in the South American
countries. By the end of 1929, our investments abroad had reached the
astonishing total of nearly 18 billion dollars. Since 1929 the day of
reckoning has come, and the United States is beginning to count the
cost of becoming banker to the world. In excess of 6 billion dollars of
our foreign investments, exclusive of war debts, were in default in 1933.
No small part of this loss, the bulk of which falls on the innocent and
helpless individual investor, must be counted a cost of our imperialistic
tendencies.

Despite the heavy losses sustained by individual investors, financial
imperialism has paid the great investment banks handsomely. They
quickly unloaded the foreign bonds on lesser banks, and made a good
profit on the operation. The lesser banks, in turn, unloaded the foreign
securities on their clients, the latter of whom ultimately held the bag
and bore the losses resulting from the avarice and irresponsibility of
the great investment banks in the field of financial imperialism.

Not only has finance capitalism undermined the capitalistic system as
a whole by its speculative practices, and not only is it being challenged
by the growth of state capitalism, but it also appears to be on the
decline because even capitalistic business is gradually escaping from its
control. Indeed, it is not unfair to say that finance capitalism has now
reached its twilight period, even if private capitalism continues to be
powerful for some time in the United States.

136 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

These rather startling facts were demonstrated by voluminous evidence
given before the Temporary National Economic Committee in Washing-
ton in 1938-39. This is analyzed and summarized with characteristic
insight and clarity by Stuart Chase in two brilliant articles in Harper's
Magazine for February and March, 1940.

In the old days, finance capitalism prospered and enjoyed a strangle
hold on industry because many new industries were being established
and older industries were expanding their capital plant to produce more
goods. The investment bankers loaned the money for plant expansion
and sold bonds for this and for the new industries, as well as marketing
the stocks which were issued. It was difficult to build a new plant or
to expand an old one unless the investment banks would make the loans
and underwrite the sale of securities.

In the 1920's, business expansion was kept up by some five main factors
or influences: (1) housing construction after the first World War; (2)
extensive investments in foreign countries and the expansion of financial
imperialism; (3) the growth of consumer credit and installment buying;
(4) tolerance of large inventory accumulations; and (5) government
construction, especially in the way of automobile highways and school
buildings.

Since the depression, business expansion and the demand for loans
from investment bankers have fallen off markedly for a number of
reasons: (1) technological improvements, leading to increased efficiency
of capital plants and lessening the need for plant expansion; (2) over-
production, as a result of inadequate mass purchasing power; (3) the
disastrous experience with foreign investments and the closing of many
areas to foreign financial penetration, as a result of economic nationalism,
totalitarian economics and war; (4) the decline in the rate of popula-
tion growth; and (5) the fear of New Deal policies and other current
trends by business and finance — i.e. lack of confidence. Though business
profits in 1936-37 were about what they were in 1928-29, the re-
investment in business enterprise was only about one third of what it
was in 1928-29. Most of the business expansion since 1929 has been
due to government investments and enterprise under the New Deal, such
as P.W.A., W.P.A., and other federal projects.

Hence, the demand for the services of investment banks in granting
loans and floating securities has fallen off to an amazing extent. On
top of this is the impressive and ominous fact that, even when plants
are expanded or new plants built, the great corporations finance this
expansion from their own funds. These funds are drawn mainly from
three sources: (1) depreciation reserves, (2) depletion reserves, and
(3) undistributed corporate profits and surpluses. Between 1925 and
1940, American business put aside some 63 billion dollars in depreciation
reserves and 6 billion dollars in depletion reserves. Between 1922 and
1929, some 15 billion dollars were laid by in undistributed profits, and
this fund has since been increased, in spite of its temporary taxation
by the federal government.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 137

We may give some examples of this financing of plant expansion by
business itself, independent of investment banks. The United States
Steel Corporation raised $1,130,000,000 out of a total of $1,222,000,000
required for plant expansion and reconditioning. The General Motors
Corporation financed a gigantic expansion program wholly by its own
funds. Even on Class I railroads, between 1921 and 1938, less than
20 per cent of the capital outlay was provided by Wall Street and in-
vestment bankers.

Even more striking as evidence of the decaying power of finance
capitalism and investment banks is the fact that business concerns re-
quiring long-term loans for expansion and other purposes no longer
invariably go to the investment banks. There is a growing tendency to
short-cut the process, and go directly to the great insurance companies,
which have a vast reserve to lend. In 1938, for example, some 37 per
cent of all bonds and notes were handled through loans by insurance
companies and other large savings institutions. That the trend is
upward here may be seen from the fact that in 1936 only 11 per cent
of loans were made outside of the investment banks.

Even though not nearly so much money is made by the investment
banks through loans for plant expansion and in floating securities as
was the case before 1929, yet the great investment bankers do still
control, not only the corporations which have ceased to need their loans
but also the insurance companies which make many loans that invest-
ment banks formerly made. This they do, as already explained, by
interlocking directorates, whereby the great investment bankers domi-
nate industries, railroads, utilities, and insurance companies. It will
require more than a falling off in their loan market to dislodge them
from this vantage-point and the controlling power that it gives.

Industrial Capitalism, Industrial Waste, and
Inadequate Mass Purchasing Power

Attempts have been made, especially by Carl Snyder in his Capitalism
the Creator,12 to attribute the remarkable developments in industry
and transportation during the last two centuries to capitalism. It is
difficult to know just how much of this impressive industrial evolution
can be attributed to businessmen, dominated by capitalistic outlook,
and how much it was due chiefly to scientists and engineers, who brought
about the great inventions.18 It so happened that these inventions took
place at a time when capitalism dominated our economic order. Cer-
tainly, remarkable economic expansion has taken place under such
capitalistic auspices, but it cannot be demonstrated that this has been
due to capitalism. If another type of economic system had been in
existence, industrial expansion might have done as well or better. Cer-
tainly, the state-controlled economy of Prussia in the eighteenth century

12 Macmillan. 1940.

13 See, F. W. Taussig, Inventors and Money-Makers, Macmillan, 1915.

138 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

demonstrated far greater economic efficiency than the free capitalistic
system in England during the same period. Or, again, the develop-
ment of German railroads under Bismarckian and later German state
capitalism was far more efficient and sound than American railroad
development after 1870 under unrestricted capitalism and wildcat in-
vestment enterprise.

The remarkable economic expansion attributed to capitalism took
place during the ascendency of industrial capitalism. This came to
an end shortly after the beginning of the present century, and finance
capitalism has surely done little to stimulate industrial development.
Such industrial development as has taken place in the last decades has
been due to the momentum of the earlier industrial capitalism, to the
impulse from the first World War, to the work of the few industrial
capitalists who have survived into the present century, such as Henry
Ford, and to greatly increased governmental expenditures since 1933.
Therefore, even if we concede that capitalism was once a "creator" of
industrial enterprise and business expansion, it can hardly be maintained
that it is such in the present stage of finance capitalism.

Many critics of capitalism regard it as, at present, two stages removed
from efficiency and vigor. Industrial capitalism is today under the
dominion of finance capitalism, which is more concerned with financial
speculation than with industrial production. For this reason, repre-
sentatives of industrial capitalism and their economic defenders lay
stress upon the antagonism between speculative finance and sound busi-
ness. It is alleged that if the octopus of finance were raised from busi-
ness, industrial capitalism could once more operate in an efficient and
dynamic manner. But the industrial engineers contend that even business
and industrial capitalism are notoriously inefficient and laggard, judged
by engineering standards. They contend that only well-trained indus-
trial egineers can give us a truly efficient economy in these times.

Though finance capitalism dominates all forms of large capitalistic
enterprise today, industrial capitalism is still a powerful factor in modern
economic life. Its two most serious weaknesses are economic waste and
the failure to turn back enough profits in terms of wages and salaries
to provide for the mass purchasing power upon which industrial capitalism
depends. Of course, the domination of finance capitalism over industrial
capitalism is responsible for much of the waste and concentration of
wealth which are too often laid wholly at the door of industrial capital-
ism. Moreover, finance capitalism usually determines what shall be
done with the earnings of industrial capitalism and makes it impossible
for enlightened employers to return more to the public in the form of
higher wages, even if they desire to do so.

The vast amount of waste in our productive and consumptive proc-
esses has been made the subject of an interesting study by Stuart
Chase. He holds that at least half the available man power of America
is wasted as a result of the unscientific methods of our competitive
order:

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 139

An aeroplane view of America would disclose a very large fraction of the avail-
able man-power worklcss on any given working day; would disclose another
large fraction making and distributing things which are of no real use to any-
body; and a third fraction taking two hours to do a job which engineers have
found can be done in one — and which some men are actually doing in one. . . .

Half and more of our man-power counting for nothing; half and more of the
yearly output of natural resources heedlessly scattered and destroyed ... a
billion slaves of energy turning useless wheels, dragging unneeded loads. Motion,
speed, momentum unbounded — to an end never clearly defined, to a goal unknown
and unseen. If there be a philosophy of waste, it lies in the attempt to clarify
that goal, to turn men's eyes towards the whyfore of the sweat of their bodies
and of their brains.1*

In 1921, a Committee of the Federated American Engineering Societies
published a comprehensive report on Waste in Industry. The introduc-
tion to this report was written by Herbert Hoover. Commenting on this
report, Raymond T. Bye and W. W. Hewett conclude that Mr. Chase's
estimate of total waste is "very conservative." These authors present
the following tabular summary of the conclusions of the 1921 report:

PERCENTAGE OF WASTE IN INDUSTRY

Points Assayed

Against the Best

Industry Plants Studied

Men's Clothing Mfg 26.73

Building Industry 30.15

Printing 30.50

Boot and Shoe Mfg 12.50

Metal Trades 6.00

Textile Mfg 28.00

Points Assayed

Against the Average of

All Plants Studied

63.78

53.00

57.61

40.83

28.66

49.20

Ratio of
the Best to the
Average Plant
1:2
1:1%
1:2
1:3
1 :4%
1:1%

A plant in which all possible forms of waste were present would be charged
with a hundred points in this table. As no plant is entirely wasteful in every
respect, the number of points in any one case would be less than a hundred.
In the men's clothing industry, for example, out of a hundred per cent possible
waste, the best plant shows 26.73 as the actual waste found. The average
clothing manufacturing concern runs almost three times that, or 63.78. It will
be noticed that the average efficiency of industry is very far below that achieved
by the best plant in each of the industries listed. The ratio of the best plant to
the average is approximately one to two. . . .

The following table, taken from the Hoover Report, shows the relative respon-
sibility for waste in industry as assayed against management, labor and other
factors •

Responsibility As-
sayed Against Outside
Responsibility Contacts (the Public,
Assayed Against Trade Relationships ,
Labor and Other Factors)

16% 9%

21 14

28 9

11 16

9 10

10 40

Responsibility
Assayed Against
Industry Management

Men's Clothing Mfg 75%

Building Industry 65

Printing 63

Boot and Shoe Mfg 73

Metal Trades 81

Textile Mfg 50

Tragedy of Waste, Macmillan, 1925, pp. 269, 274-275.

140 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

The table indicates that more than half the waste in industry is due
to faulty management, while less than one quarter of the total waste is
due to labor. The remaining waste caused by outside contacts of a
plant is, with the exception of the textile business, apparently of little
importance. If we are to eliminate waste and increase the efficiency of
production, it is apparent that management must take the lead, for
management has the greater part of the responsibility.15

These figures deal mainly with wastes in our industrial order between
the first World War and the depression. The waste has been even
greater since 1929. Isidor Lubin estimates that we lost 140 billion dol-
lars in potential national income between 1930 and 1938. Lewis Corey
puts the loss for these years as high as 200 billions, and says it is 300
billion dollars if we take into consideration unused potential plant
capacity for production.

Not only has business enterprise been wasteful in actual production;
it has also squandered disastrously the natural resources of the world
— forests, ores, oil, land, waterpower. This had become a national
scandal as early as the administration of Theodore Roosavelt.

The growth of the super-corporation and big business has had many
important results for industrial capitalism. The most beneficial result
of industrial consolidation and big business is greater efficiency in both
production and distribution:

Not only does big business pay its workers, both salaried and wage workers,
more per hour than either of the other categories; not only are the conditions
of work more favorable and the hours shorter, but also the consumer is best
served by big business. He receives more for his money than he does from either
of the other producing divisions.

In sum, where big business operates, Americans have a great advantage over
citizens in other societies; where little business operates, Americans may or may
not have an advantage, and where the old atomic individual enterprise persists,
the various societies are more or less on a par. . . .

Thus big business not only gives the consumer more for his money than the
consumer receives in other societies, but big business pays out in the process
higher wages than little business and much higher wages than the profits the
average farmer succeeds in realizing.

If the above presentation is roughly accurate, the higher living standard in
America is to a large extent the product of big business. And, in reverse,
wherever the American standard of living is unduly low, where labor is sweated,
the consumer cheated, and the enterprise wrecked by non-profitable operation,
we usually find either little business or some older form of production, such as
sharecropping or mixed subsistence farming.16

Unfortunately, along with these advantages, there are adverse aspects
of big business. While absolute monopoly can rarely be attained, suf-
ficient control over production can be secured so that it can be curtailed
and prices can be maintained at a fairly stable level, in spite of changes

15 R. T. Bye and W. W. Hewett, Applied Economics, Crofts, 1928, pp. 45-46.
18 Harold Loeb, "Twelve Trust-Busters in Search of Monopoly," Common Sense,
January, 1939.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 141

in general business conditions. This enables big business to control
production in the interest of corporate profits rather than the service of
the public. It also enables business to keep prices high, in spite of
general business depression, unemployment, low wages, and. wide-spread
lowering of mass purchasing-power. By applying drastically these
methods, big business can, as E. D. Kennedy has shown in his Dividends
to Pay/7 make itself relatively independent of economic fluctuations
and the business cycle, so far as profits are concerned. By curtailing
expenditures, big concerns can make almost as much money in depression
periods as in good times. And, through accumulation of corporate sur-
pluses and undistributed dividends, they can pay high dividends in de-
pression periods, even if earnings fall off greatly. This can be strikingly
illustrated from the facts drawn from the depression after 1929. In 1932,
total wage payments in the United States were only 45 per cent of what
they were in 1929, and even real wages in 1932 were only 49 per cent
of the 1929 level. On the other hand, dividend and interest payments
declined but slightly from 1929 to 1932— from 173 to 160 (using 1926 as
100). Indeed, in 1931, when employment and wages had both slumped
alarmingly, dividend and interest payments were above the 1929 level —
187, as against 173 in 1929.18 Another disadvantage lies in the usual
divorce of ownership from control in big business. This makes it pos-
sible for the controlling clique to govern business policies in the interest
of the corporate insiders rather than the stockholders or the public.

Attacks upon big business, just because it is big — a hangover of radical
frontier economic philosophy — are to be deplored. The advantages of
big business should be emphasized and conserved. The disadvantages
should be explored, exposed, and terminated. What we need to know
is why the obvious productive advantages of big business are usually
associated with anti-social policies and results, such as curtailing pro-
duction, reducing the income of the masses, and crippling mass purchas-
ing-power:

The fundamental questions in regard to our economic procedures are: Why
does the United States fail to utilize part of its productive facilities? Why are
ten million men, more or less, not to speak of equipment resources and knowl-
edge, prevented from creating needed wealth? Why must an undersupplied
society support men in idleness, when the idle men would prefer to correct the
deficiency in supplies ? 19

And, while we investigate the real evils of big business, we should not
ignore the defects of little business and the inefficiency of current Amer-
ican farming. These should also be investigated and exposed. But
there is little probability of such action, because it is politically un-
popular. It is easy to get popular support for attacks upon, and in-

17 Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940.

is See P. H. Douglas, "Whose Depression?" The World Tomorrow, December 28,
1932.
19Loeb, loc. cit.

142 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

vestigations of, big business, but it is politically risky to question the
practices of little business and the farming groups.

Before we proceed to take up the distribution of wealth and its effect
upon mass-purchasing power, we may well present the following table,
which indicates the distribution of national income on a so-called func-
tional basis in the years before the great depression of 1929.

AGGREGATE NATIONAL INCOME SHOWING
BROAD FUNCTIONAL DIVISIONS 1917-1929

(In Millions of Dollars)

Individual Ratio of

& Interest Wages &

Wages & Corporate Dividends Salaries

Year Totals Salaries* Profits & Rent to Total

1929 $95,188 $53,350 $22,626 $18,804 56%

1928 94,247 50,617 25,242 17,985 54

1927 87,863 49,724 20,523 17,235 56

1926 87,193 49,245 20,671 16,904 56

1925 86,757 46,855 23,432 16,102 54

1924 77,973 44,493 18,168 14,976 51

1923 75,608 42,893 17,968 14,426 56

1922 66,592 37,700 15,071 13,536 57

1921 58,387 36,214 9,034 12,871 62

1920 73,094 42,283 17,831 12,665 58

1919 69,016 35,399 21,823 11,510 51

1918 60,679 32,324 17,875 10,222 53

1917 55,041 25,802 19,038 9,980 51

* Maurice Leven, Harold O. Moulton, and Clark Warburton, America's Capacity to Cow-
an we (The Brooking* Institution, 1934), p. 157.

Industrial capitalism depends for its vitality and prosperity primarily
upon mass purchasing-power. The goal of industrial capitalism is to
manufacture goods, which will be sold in large quantities for relatively
high prices, so that a considerable profit can be made in the process.
It is obvious that no such volume of goods can profitably be sold unless
the mass of the population has a sufficient income to buy them. In
other words, there must be steady employment, good wages and salaries,
and a decent income for the agricultural classes. Only in this way can
there be sales which are adequate to keep industrial capitalism in
active and healthy operation. This is so clear and simple that it
might almost be regarded as sixth-grade logic. But the captains of
finance and industry seem unable to grasp this elementary truth. We
have had an amazing concentration of wealth which has destroyed mass
purchasing power and brought capitalism to the very verge of collapse.
This fact may be illustrated from familiar American material.

The enormous income from financial and industrial enterprises since
the Industrial Revolution has produced personal fortunes which would
have been almost incomprehensible in the days of Alexander Hamilton.
Concomitant with the growth of private wealth is its unprecedented con-
centration in the hands of a few persons. The Brookings Institution
study, America's Capacity to Consume,20 illustrated this dismal fact.

20 By Leven Moulton, and Warburton, Brookings Institution, 1934.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 143

In 1929, some 6 million families, or 21 per cent of the total, had incomes
of less than $1,000 per family. About 12 million families, or 42 per cent
of the total, had incomes of less than $1,500. Twenty million families,
or 71 per cent of the total, had incomes of less than $2,500 per family.
The 0.1 per cent of the families at the top of the economic pyramid,
with family incomes in excess of $75,000 each, received as much of the
total national income as the poorest 42 per cent of the families at the
bottom of the income group.

Contrary to general impression, the situation was worse during the
New Deal period, though this was the result of the depression, and New
Deal aid produced a far better situation than existed in 1932. The
National Resources Committee studied family incomes in the year from
July, 1935, to July, 1936. It was found that the lowest third of the
families received $780 or less per family, with an average family income
of $471. The middle third of the families received between $780 and
$1,450 each, with an average family income of $1,076. The upper
third of the families received incomes between $1,450 and several mil-
lions each, with an average family income of $3,000. Over 70 per
cent of the poorest third of the families received no relief or other aid,
though their average income was only $471 — a fact that emphasizes
the paralysis of mass purchasing-power through the maldistribution of
income.

We may emphasize these facts further by a few figures taken from
income statistics in 1928. The average income of all wage earners
gainfully employed in 1928 in the United States was $1,205. The un-
skilled wage earners averaged less than $1,000, and the agricultural
workers only slightly more than $500. More than 60 per cent of all
American families received less than the $2,000 a year needed to main-
tain health and decency. This poorest 60 per cent received only a
quarter of the national income, while the richest 1.2 per cent actually
received just about the same amount. In order further to emphasize
the fact that the general situation did not markedly change under the
New Deal, we may reproduce Walter B. Pitkin's picture of how the
American people fared in an economic sense in 1935.21

INCOME CLASSES IN 1935

Number in Each Class How Much They Receive per Capita

1. Upper class, very rich, about 500,000 $10,000 each, or $ 5,000,000,000

2. Middle class 12,000,000 1,000 each, or 12,000,000,000

3. Self-suporting workers, farmers,

small businessmen 34,500,000 500 each, or 17,250,000,000

4. Marginals, earning most of living,

but receiving some aid 15,000,000 300 each, or 4,500,000,000

5. Submerged idle, mostly on relief 65,000,000 75 each, or 4,875,000,000

Total 127,000,000 $43,625,000,000

21 Adapted from Pitkin, Capitalism Carries On, McGraw-Hill, 1935, pp. 180-181.

144 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

That these inadequacies in mass income had a disastrous influence in
restricting purchasing-power is self-evident, but we may illustrate the
matter by some relevant examples. To be very practical, one may ex-
amine the figures for 1928. The approximately 28 million families,
made up of persons with incomes under $5,000, had a total money income
of about 65 billions. On a fair budget computation, the most they could
spend for manufactured goods was 38 billions. Yet, in 1928, we manu-
factured goods (not including those exported) to the value of 55 billions.
The slightly more than 1,000,000 persons with incomes over $5,000 an-
nually could hardly buy up the surplus of 17 billion dollars worth of
manufactured goods.

Another demonstration of the inadequacy of mass purchasing-power
is afforded by the following statistics. Between 1923 and 1929, the
value of manufactured products increased by some 10 billion dollars.
The workers, salaried classes, and farmers were supposed to buy up this
10 billion dollars worth of new goods. But wages during this period
advanced by only 600 millions. The workers could not buy the in-
creased volume of goods with only 600 million more at their disposal;
the salaried classes had made gains in income only slightly greater than
those in wages; while the farmers were getting much less in 1929 than
in 1923.

How many more goods could be sold if income were more equitably
divided has been indicated by Leven, Moulton, and Warburton. In
1929, over 70 per cent of American families had incomes of less than
$2,500. If these 20 million families had all had their incomes raised
to $2,500 each, they would, by the spending standards of that year, have
spent 40 per cent more for food, 65 per cent more for homes and living
quarters, 65 per cent more for clothing, and 115 per cent more for other
consumers' goods and services. Such additional expenditures would have
prevented the depression.

There is every evidence that the American masses spend liberally
for essential goods and services when they have the income with which
to make such purchases. The following table gives the relative propor-

PERIOD FROM 1922 TO 1929 22

Per Cent Per Cent Per Cent Spent for

Income Classes Saved Taxes Goods and Services

$1,000 and under 33 94

1,000, under $2,000 5 2 93

2,000, under $3,000 11 2 87

3,000, under $5,000 16 2 82

5,000, under $10,000 14 3 83

10,000, under $25,000 22 4 74

25,000, under $50,000 30 8 62

50,000, under $100,000 31 13 56

100,000, under $150,000 35 15 50

150,000, under $300,000 44 16 40

300,000, under $500,000 67 17 16

500,000, under $1,000,000 71 17 12

Over $1,000,000 77 17 6

22 M. P. Taylor, Common Sense About Machines and Unemployment, Winston,
1933, p. 97.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 145

tion of income spent and saved by the various income classes in the
United States. It shows that the rich can spend only a small fraction
of their income for goods and services.

If those who control and direct our financial and industrial life do
not voluntarily provide for a just and efficient distribution of the social
income, there is one way of attacking the problem which does not involve
any revolutionary radicalism. This is to tax high incomes heavily, turn
the money over to the public treasury, and put men to work on govern-
ment enterprises. A considerable start has been made in this direction
as the result of the income tax, which was made constitutional by the
Sixteenth Amendment after many years of patient effort by reformers.
But the income tax in the United States is still far lower than that on
comparable incomes in Great Britain before 1939. The following table
will indicate the relative payments made on gross income by the aver-
age married man without children in England and the United States in
1934, before preparedness costs boosted the English tax rate:

INCOME TAX SCHEDULES IN THE UNITED STATES AND
GREAT BRITAIN 1934 23

Gross Income United States Tax British Tax

$ 3,000 $ 20 $ 311

5,000 100 711

10,000 480 1,862

25,000 2,520 7,369

50,000 8,600 19,654

100,000 30,100 48,101

500,000 263,600 307,910

1,000,000 571,000 639,160

It has been estimated that, if we adopted the British income tax rates
(as they were in 1939) in this country, it would yield our Federal
Treasury in excess of 3 billion dollars a year. As it was, the total indi-
vidual income tax return in 1934 was $511,399,778. Until the New
Deal reforms there were also various loopholes, such as the deductions
for capital losses, through taking advantage of which even J. P. Morgan
himself was able to avoid paying any income tax in 1931 and 1932.
Our estate and inheritance taxes are also far lower than in Great
Britain. It is calculated that, if the British estate and inheritance taxes
were adopted here, they would yield an additional income of 750 mil-
lion dollars.

The federal and state governments are in part responsible for our
failure to collect as much as we might from both incomes and estates.
Rather more than 40 billion dollars of wealth is able to hide from the tax
collector through the system of issuing tax-exempt securities. At the end
of 1932, there were outstanding wholly tax-exempt federal issues of ap-
proximately $22,250,000,000, and state and local issues free from federal
taxation to the amount of about $16,500,000,000. However, the issuance
of tax-exempt securities was abandoned in part in 1941. President
Roosevelt has at times proclaimed his intentions to introduce a program

23 See also below, p. 197.

146 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

of taxation in proportion to capacity to pay, but aside from plugging the
holes in the income tax, placing a tax on undistributed corporation sur-
pluses, and some minor changes, there was no substantial change in the
federal taxation policy under the New Deal until the preparedness activ-
ity of 1941. That crushing taxation lies ahead is now certain.

Is Capitalism Worth Saving?

The capitalistic system is certainly not worth saving if we could get
a better system without paying a price for the change which would be
greater than the advantages brought about by the new system of economic
life. To deal with this question intelligently, we must make our meaning
more precise. If one asks whether it is worth while to save the type of
capitalism which existed from 1921 to 1933, the answer must be in the
negative. We could not save it if we wished to do so.

Appraised against the background of our present stage of technological
evolution and our vast natural resources, the capitalistic system in the
United States from 1921 to 1933 did not make a sufficiently impressive
showing to justify any serious wish to retain it, even if it could be re-
vived. As we have seen, over 70 per cent of our families did not have
income enough to buy sufficient food to enable them to live in a truly
healthy fashion. Ninety per cent of the families could not purchase
for themselves a liberal diet, such as any self-respecting person should
have available in this day and age. Ninety-eight per cent of the popula-
tion received less than $5,000 a year, whereas a system of production
for use, in conjunction with our existing technology, could certainly
have produced an income of $5,000 a year for all American adults.
Forty per cent of our American families unquestionably lived in
poverty, misery and extreme economic insecurity in 192&-29, the most
prosperous years which the old capitalistic system ever boasted. Taking
into account the potentialities for the production and distribution of
wealth in this country since 1920 and the showing which capitalism
actually made in the years when it was most free to demonstrate its
powers, we may safely say that it failed to justify its existence. This
verdict may be rendered without the slightest infection with Marxian
dogma or any passion for economic revolution. In passing a verdict
upon the contributions and virtues of capitalism in the United States,,
one must consider not only what it did but what it might have done,,
if it had produced the utmost possible within the limits of our tech-
nology and resources and had distributed these products in a reasonably
equitable fashion.

Indeed, one may go even further and state that the question of
whether we should save the old-line capitalism of the period prior to
1933 is today a purely academic question, in any event. It could not
be saved in the form in which it existed from 1921 to 1933. In the
decade after 1921, capitalism was not interfered with to any marked
degree by political agencies. The Harding and Coolidge administrations

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 147

believed thoroughly in the doctrine that the less government in business
the better. Capitalism was as unimpeded as it ever can expect to be
in the present stage of social and economic evolution. It had every
opportunity to prove its worth and to make its achievements permanent.
As an actual matter of fact, it folded up in the terrific financial crash
of October, 1929, through its own weaknesses and defects. There was
no governmental interference or threat of interference to cause uncer-
tainty or fear. Indeed, there was every governmental encouragement of
the theories and practices which were being followed.

After 1929 Mr. Hoover, for four years, attempted to rehabilitate and
restore this capitalism by strictly orthodox deflationary capitalistic pol-
icies. His administration ended in the most abysmal depth of depression
and despondency which the American economic system has ever known.
These facts indicate that capitalism, even under the most favorable
conditions, could not of itself maintain economic health nor could it
be restored to health by traditional methods. It is quite possible that,
by the most drastic deflationary methods after 1929, at the cost of
tremendous suffering to the masses, the system might have staggered to
its feet again for a few years. But the events of the Hoover administra-
tion, together with many other evident considerations, have thoroughly
demonstrated that we can no longer rely upon the fiction of the auto-
matic business cycle to restore capitalism to prosperity. There is little
evidence that, in our day, there can be any automatic recovery from
serious depressions.

We may, therefore, fairly conclude, Wendell Willkie to the contrary
notwithstanding, that the essentially laissez-faire capitalism of Coolidge
days, to which so many of our economic royalists look back with a
sentimental nostalgia, would not be worth saving, and could not be
saved if we wanted to preserve it. Such steps as will be necessary to
rehabilitate it would require fundamental changes in its character.

Much more to the point is the question of whether or not we would
find it worth while to preserve a form of capitalism which is capable of
preservation. In other words, can any form of capitalism be made to
work, and would its achievements justify us in cherishing and continu-
ing it? This is a question upon which there may be legitimate differ-
ences of opinion, and one which only a cock-sure dogmatist would dare
to answer definitively at the present time.

In certain countries, an economic system which is basically capitalistic
has operated fairly well, considering the resources and financial burdens
of the states involved. In England from 1919 to 1939, capitalism
weathered passably well difficulties far greater than those met with in
the United States. England's technology is inferior to ours, her natural
resources are far more limited, and her financial burdens are infinitely
greater. In the Scandinavian countries, in Finland, in Czechoslovakia,
in Holland, and in certain other small states, the capitalistic system
ran along fairly smoothly until invaded by Germany. Whether capital-
ism in these, countries possessed sufficient strength to have made its

148 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

existence permanent, had it not been for the second World War, is a
question which no sensible person would presume to answer today.

In the case of all the states which we have mentioned above, the
capitalism which existed bore little resemblance to that of the Coolidge
era in the United States. In England, finance capitalism was limited
in extent and closely regulated by the state. Not a bank has failed in
England in modern times. Half the families in England are members of
some cooperative enterprise. Even the Tory government began the
nationalization of the coal mines late in 1937. Labor unionism had
been fully accepted in England for more than half a century. An
elaborate system of social insurance had been in operation in England
for upwards of thirty years. There arc competent economists who
believe that, if the United States were run on the social and economic
lines of Tory England in 1938, the result would be so marked and bene-
ficial that the Coolidge era would appear, by comparison, like the bot-
tom of a severe depression. The author of this book shares this view
most heartily. In the Scandinavian countries, there was a marked de-
velopment of both cooperation and state capitalism, which seemed to add
materially to the prosperity and permanence of the economy. If the
Swedish procedure could be applied wholesale to the United States, it
is probable that the results would be even more impressive than the
operation of the American economy after the English model,
tern are introduced in this country, the system will neither be worth
preserving nor capable of preservation.

In normal times, approximately three quarters of the federal budget
is devoted to paying for past wars and getting ready for future wars.
In an extended war, costing more than 200 billion dollars and bringing
about wartime socialism, there is no reasonable prospect of the survival
of private capitalism as a major factor in American economic life.

Radicals are inclined to sneer at the very suggestion of saving capital-
ism in the United States. They believe that it cannot be saved, and
they maintain that its abuses far outrun its benefits. If the radicals
could offer us any practical alternative to capitalism which stands any
reasonable chance of being introduced at any immediate time in the
future and would be clearly superior to capitalism, there would be little
ground for refusing to follow their lead. It cannot be assumed that
capitalism is the sole type of economy upon which the Deity has
bestowed divine approval.

The plain fact is, however, that there seems to be no immediate or
practical alternative to capitalism in the United States. A collectivistic
economy, producing solely for use, a Technocracy, or an extended de-
velopment of cooperative enterprise seems out of the question as any-
thing more than a benevolent dream in this country for some decades or
generations. Wartime socialism may be followed by post-war fascism.

Perhaps the most forceful argument against the possibility of economic

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 14$

planning under capitalism was presented by Abraham Epstein.-4 He
argues that economic planning and business stabilization under a system
of competitive capitalism is self-contradictory and utterly hopeless:

The prospect of any well-managed corporation introducing a stabilization
program at a financial sacrifice for the benefit of its employees is really fantastic.
The rare individual who may be so philanthropically inclined will not remain
in business very long. . . . Were any corporation to embark on a program
embodying any considerable number of these suggestions, its management would
be driven into insanity and its stockholders into bankruptcy.24

Furthermore, successful stabilization in one industry might mean ruin
for others:

The success of the B.V.D. Co. spells disaster for the heavy underwear concerns,
while increased consumption of macaroni strikes at the potato farmers.

Third, Dr. Epstein contends that no real success has ever been at-
tained by important business concerns in any fundamental type of
stabilization. Even the most humane employers cannot guarantee em-
ployment to more than a fraction of their whole labor force.

Finally, Epstein maintains that stabilization seems particularly diffi-
cult in large business establishments, which employ the majority of
American workers:

A check of the various companies which are reported to have introduced
stabilized production reveals that they are all primarily small corporations,
manufacturing things which easily lend themselves to regularized production.
They produce soaps, macaroni, noodles, package tea. . . . The total number
of workers engaged in these industries does not exceed more than a fraction of
1 per cent of the wage-earners in the United States.

Some Problems of Capital and Labor

The United States has been notoriously backward in accepting the
principle of organized labor and collective bargaining. Such policies as
these were publicly accepted and protected by legislation in the civilized
countries of Europe a half century or more ago. Even the German Em-
pire fully recognized the principle of labor organization in the last decade
of the nineteenth century. The United States took no effective steps to
legalize real collective bargaining until the National Industrial Recovery
Act was passed in 1933. Even then the government was loath to enforce
this legislation in resolute fashion. E. T. Weir, Tom Girdler, and other
steel men successfully defied the government with respect to the en-
forcement of the collective bargaining clause of the NRA. After the
latter was set aside by the Supreme Court, more comprehensive and
sweeping protection of collective bargaining was embodied in the Na-

24 Abraham Epstein, "The Stabilization Nonsense," The American Mercury, Jan-
uary, 1932.

150 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

tional Labor Relations Act, passed in the summer of 1935. Employers
fought it vigorously, but the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality
of the act in 1937. But it has required great courage and fortitude on
the part of the National Labor Relations Board to enforce the Wagner
Act, even with the backing of the United States Supreme Court. Its
courageous enforcement of the law was attacked through a vicious
propaganda on the part of both employers and reactionary senators
and congressmen. The integrity and fairness of the Labor Board was
confirmed by the federal courts, which upheld the decisions of the Board
with amazingly few exceptions.

No fair-minded person would deny that there were many defects in
the older types of labor organization, such as the American Federation
of Labor, Such things as limitation of output, labor racketeering, and
selfish concentration upon the interests of highly paid skilled labor were
only the more notorious of the common abuses. The employers had
a case against such deficiencies in labor unionism, for the latter offered
to the employer little, if anything, except the prospect of paying higher
wages for less or poorer work. But the employers amply revealed
the bad faith in their criticisms of these weaknesses of the old-line labor
unionism. Just as soon as new and more aggressive unions appeared,
like the Congress of Industrial Organizations, relatively free from labor
racketeering, repudiating the limitation-of-output policy, and providing
for the organization of both skilled and unskilled labor, most employers
began to show a new and unusual affection for the American Federation
of Labor, with all of its defects which employers had been denouncing
for years. Their strange new enthusiasm for the latter was obviously
based on the fact that it was less aggressive and dangerous to reactionary
employers than the new industrial unions under the banner of the CIO.
In other words, what the employers desired was not so much reforms
in labor organization as relatively weak and non-aggressive unions.
The same bad faith was evidenced in the persistent demand of em-
ployers that labor unions incorporate and become responsible. Yet
the employers have done their best to weaken, wreck, or crush unions,
thus making it impossible for them to give any true effect to responsi-
bility, even if they were willing to assume it. Responsibility means
little unless accompanied by strength.

One may state with considerable assurance that there is little prospect
for the persistence of capitalism unless the principle of collective bar-
gaining is willingly accepted by the great majority of employers and
strong and aggressive labor unions are legalized and tolerated. Capi-
talism cannot endure without adequate mass purchasing power, founded
upon high wages and salaries and relative steady employment. Em-
ployers have repeatedly and amply demonstrated that they cannot be
trusted to pay high wages and salaries of their own accord. Only
strong labor unionism and effective, collective bargaining can assure
steady employment and permanent high wages. The vigorous labor
leader is the truest friend of the enlightened employer under the capi-

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 151

talistic system. At the same time, one may reasonably demand that
labor be efficient and earn its wages. But studies of waste in industry
have shown that employers have a very slight case against labor unions
on this ground. Even in the era when the older and more wasteful
unions dominated the labor field, the waste attributable to employers1
policies and practices far outran the waste which could be attributed to
labor. Indeed, the famous Hoover report of 1920 showed that the
waste due to management was more than double the waste which was
attributable to labor.

Some of our best economists believe that collective bargaining might
be made to work effectively if we could bring about some modicum of
common sense, good-will, and information on both sides. A powerful
case is made out for this thesis by Sumner H. Slichter of Harvard
University in his article "Collective Bargaining at Work."25 He gives
a very interesting actual case history of an employer who had been
maintaining orderly relations with a national labor union during the
previous four years. Though he had not previously believed in collec-
tive bargaining, he felt that the NRA was introducing a new era in
American industrial life, making collective bargaining a permanent
feature of our economy. So he signed up with organized labor in August,
1933, and adjusted his business policy to the new dispensation.

This employer had nothing to guide him except horse-sense, but he
had a considerable stock of this. He decided that, if he was going to
get along with organized labor, there were two basic things which he must
do: (1) he must give his union employees some clear notion of the
nature of his business and the policies he was following, and (2) he
must convince his employees of his basic honesty and his intention to
be fair to them in his relations with labor.

Our employer knew that it would be impossible to take the rank
and file of his employees into his confidence with respect to business
methods. So he talked these matters over in detail with the business
agent of the union, leaving it to the latter to carry on as much education
as possible with the union workers. In his effort to promote a sense
of fairness, he put a ban upon the former procedure of easy and arbitrary
discharge of workers, cautioned his foremen to show some consideration
to employees, and exercised far greater care in hiring new workers.
Further, he ordered his foremen to investigate carefully the alleged
grievances of workers. The union officials were carefully consulted
in all matters of labor policy, and they were found willing to cooperate
with the employer in first warning and then disposing of inefficient
workers.

The net result was the development of a satisfactory philosophy of
industrial relations. Moreover, the productive efficiency of the plant
was notably increased after collective bargaining was adopted. The
workers had a better spirit than before. Many of their grievances re-

25 Atlantic Monthly, January, 1938.

152 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

lated to inefficient operations which cut down their income from piece-
work. When these were remedied, greater labor income was assured and
with it more efficient production. The one thing which remained was to
convince the employees that it is futile to strike unless the employer
can afford to pay higher wages. Only a prosperous industry can raise
wages. If strikes destroy the prosperity of an employer, labor is killing
the goose that lays the golden egg. But the first thing which is neces-
sary here is for the employers to accept collective bargaining as a
matter of course. Laborers will not show too appreciative an interest
in the need for a prosperous industry so long as they have to fight for
their very existence:

They would appreciate the need far more keenly if American unions were
not kept so busy fighting for such elementary rights as the right to exist and to
represent their members in collective bargaining. Naturally, as long as unions
are treated as outlaw organizations by a considerable part of industry, they can
scarcely be expected to have a proper sense of their interest in the employer's
prosperity.1'0

An opinion opposed to that of Professor Schlichter is upheld with
much vigor and vehemence by Marxists and other radicals who accept
the class-struggle theory of economic relationships. They contend that
the fundamental interests of the employer and the workers are basically
and eternally antagonistic. Neither can make any concessions to the
other without being the loser. They contend that labor unions should
frankly accept the principle of the class conflict and should regard their
activities as simply a preliminary phase of that industrial warfare and
economic revolution which will ultimately overthrow capitalism and the
employers and install the proletariat in control of modern industrial
society.

Some reactionary employers have attempted to justify their opposition
to labor unionism on the ground that unions are dominated by Marxists.
This charge is particularly leveled at CIO unions. It has repeatedly
shown, however, that Marxists and Communists constitute only a small
proportion of those under the banners of the CIO. Moreover, the em-
ployers who made most use of the red herring of Communism showed
little enthusiasm for the American Federation of Labor before the
CIO appeared on the scene. And the Federation has been even no-
toriously anti-Communistic. It held out against the recognition of
Russia longer than the arch-reactionary National Security League.

Labor organization and collective bargaining have unquestionably made
greater progress under the Roosevelt administrations than in any other
comparable period in American history. The legal status of collective
bargaining now seems firmly established. But a great deal of statesman-
ship on the part of labor leaders and far more tolerance and understand-
ing on the part of employers will be required before collective bargaining

26 Schlichter, loc. cit.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 153

and high wages can exert their due and necessary influence upon the
restoration and maintenance of American economic prosperity under
the capitalistic system.

The Problem of Industrial Unemployment

The problem of industrial unemployment is probably the most des-
perate problem with which American capitalism will have to reckon.
There is little prospect that American capitalism will be overthrown by
radical opponents; but there is very grave danger that capitalism will
be devoured from within by the unprecedented inroads of unemployment.

There has been a large volume of unemployment throughout the
modern world in the last half century, and particularly between the first
and second World Wars. The amount of unemployment has varied.
In Soviet Russia, the feverish effort to carry through the nationaliza-
tion of agriculture and an ambitious industrialization program under
state auspices brought about a labor shortage, in spite of the great
population. In the fascist states the volume of unemployment was re-
duced through elaborate public works projects and the extensive arma-
ment program. In France, with a large peasant population, and with
what had long been a stationary population, it was rare that enough
man-power could be mustered at any given place to operate factories
on two shifts. In some of the lesser states of Europe, where there was
considerable cooperative enterprise and state capitalism, unemployment
was kept down to a low figure. In England there was much unemploy-
ment after the first World War, but the problem was handled fairly
well as a result of the unemployment insurance system. The latter was
also useful to states on the continent of Europe whenever unemploy-
ment was extensive.

In the United States, a natural population increase and the vast
volume of immigration, especially between 1900 and 1914, have pro-
vided a large industrial population. Further, the United States has
taken the lead in introducing labor-saving machinery, thus cutting down
the demand for man-power. For example, automatic machinery for
rolling mills in the steel industry — the so-called hot strip mill — wherever
it was introduced, brought about a 97 per cent reduction in the man-
power required. Throughout the steel industry, this reduction would
amount to about 85,000 of the highest-priced steel workers. This is
only one example and by no means the most impressive.

An important but less sweeping cause of unemployment is the "ra-
tionalization of industry" — the introduction of standards of efficiency
which endeavor to eliminate the great waste revealed by the Hoover
report and similar studies. As a result, the same volume is turned out
with a smaller working force, even if there is no change in machinery.
In agriculture, there has been a comparable introduction of labor-saving
machinery and efficiency.

In addition to the steady unemployment (as a result of defects in

154 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

capitalism and technological advances), there have been fluctuations in
employment by the operation of the so-called "business cycle." In
periods of maximum prosperity, unemployment is at a minimum. When
the cycle slumps into depression, unemployment becomes abnormally
high. Then there has been the less serious variation in the volume of
unemployment due to highly seasonal industries or to seasonal variations
in industries which operate on a year-round basis. But all other phases
of the unemployment problem have been dwarfed by the growth of an
ever larger body of chronically unemployed workers who are thrown out
of their jobs as a result of technological changes.

Paul H. Douglas estimates that, from 1897 to 1926, an average of 10
per cent of American workers were unemployed all the time. According
to a Russell Sage Foundation study, a 10 to 12 per cent average of un-
employment is a conservative estimate for the twentieth century. Un-
employment reached its height at the beginning of 1933, when the figure
was placed between 12 and 17 millions. The New Deal policies con-
siderably reduced the number by priming the pump of industry. But
even before the recession of the summer of 1937, there were about 7
million unemployed by private industry. The unemployment census
conducted in the latter part of 1937 included over 10 million workers.
Since labor-saving machines are being introduced in more frequent and
impressive fashion, we may assume that the condition will become even
more aggravated and distressing in the future.

War industries and conscription reduce unemployment for a time, but
at the close of the war the spectre of unemployment will be even larger
and more grim. Abraham Epstein has suggested the ten essential points,
listed below, in any effective program to reduce and alleviate unemploy-
ment. The New Deal legislation made a start along all ten of these lines
of reform, but it did not go far enough to much more than offset the in-
crease of unemployment due to technological advances since 1932:

1. A careful survey of unemployment giving all the facts about the actual
extent of unemployment and its industrial and regional distribution.

3. A sufficient number of efficient employment exchanges to bring together
employers and potential employees.

3. Increased stabilization of such industries as can be at least partially
stabilized.

4. An expansion of public works projects to provide employment for those
who cannot or will not be absorbed by private industry.

5. Adequate old-age pensions to remove the aged from both employment
agencies and the bread-lines.

6. The raising of the age limit at which children may be employed, thus tak-
ing out of employment at once the large number of children under sixteen now
employed and restricting the employment of those between sixteen and eighteen.

7. The reduction of the working week, as rapidly as possible and feasible.

8. The raising of wages, so as to produce that mass purchasing-power which
is essential to full operation of our factory plant.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 155

9. The institution of a nation-wide housing program, which would provide
a vast amount of employment on the 75 billion dollars' worth of construction
needed to house the United States decently.
10. The establishment of a national system of unemployment insurance.27

Certain spokesmen for private capital have attempted to free employers
from responsibility for unemployment by alleging that the great majority
of the unemployed are really unemployable — that they are loafers, de-
generates, feeble-minded, or incapable of holding a good job. But this
alibi was shattered by an elaborate survey by Fortune of WPA workers,
against whom this charge of industrial incompetence was particularly
leveled. The survey found that the WPA workers were eminently em-
ployable and only too glad to get work when the opportunity arose.

Certain writers, such as Simeon Strunsky, Walter Lippmann, and
W. J. Cameron, minimize the importance of the increasing technological
unemployment. They hold that, in the past, workers thrown out of work
by machines have always been able to find employment in new forms
of industry and that this will continue indefinitely. Their views, how-
ever, are shared by few competent students of industrial history and
contemporary economic life.

Workers thrown out of employment by new machines may be ab-
sorbed in other lines of occupation only in a new, dynamic, and expand-
ing economy. But in mature economies, like that of the United States,
any large number of persons thrown out of employment by new machines
have no prospect of finding work in new industries, save in war industries.
While novel enterprises will appear from time to time, even in the present
stage of American economic evolution, they will certainly utilize the
latest forms of labor-saving devices, and some of them may actually be
devoted to the manufacturing of labor-saving machinery. We are liter-
ally on the eve of a new era in technological unemployment. Within
another decade or so, it would probably require a 15-hour week to pro-
vide steady work for all adults in private industry.

The importance of all this for the future of capitalism is apparent to
any thoughtful reader. If private capital will not, or cannot, shorten
the working week and spread employment sufficiently to absorb the
unemployed, the only other solution under the capitalistic system is for
the state to provide employment on public work projects. If this goes
far enough, the number employed by the government may exceed the
number employed by private industry, and state capitalism will gradually
supersede private capitalism. If the state refuses to assume responsi-
bility for the unemployed, the result is likely to be revolution, which
would end both private and state capitalism.

Nor can any form of unemployment insurance deal successfully with
the volume of unemployment which is likely to exist in this country.
Nothing except an ever-increasing volume of state enterprise can take

27 "Faith Cures for Unemployment," The American Mercury, January, 1931.

156 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

care of the problem. Hence it is not surprising to find even distinguished
economists, drawn from the conservative camp, who are predicting today
that private capitalism is doomed in the United States because of the
volume of unemployment which it faces but does not handle frankly or
effectively in peacetime.

Old Age as an Industrial and Social Problem

The problem of old age is closely related to that of unemployment,
for the aged make up a constantly increasingly group of chronically and
unavoidably unemployed persons. The number of Americans over 65
years of age has been steadily increasing since 1880, when it was 3.4
per cent. In 1890, it had increased to 4.0 per cent; in 1920, to 4.6 per
cent; in 1930, to 5.4 per cent. P. K. Whelpton predicts that, when the
American population stabilizes itself around 1975, the proportion 65
years of age and over will reach 13 per cent, or in excess of 20 million
persons. Therefore the problems of old age are likely to become far more
extensive and serious as time goes on.

Next to children, the aged are the most notably dependent group in
the population. At the present time, about 25 per cent of those 65 years
or older in our population are dependent upon relief from private or
public agencies. Moreover, about 65 per cent of those aged persons who
are not receiving relief through public or private charity are being sup-
ported in whole or in part by relatives and friends. Hence we may
regard ourselves as safe in contending that more than half of the aged
in the United States fall into the class of actual dependents. As they
increase in number, they are bound to augment our problems of private
and public relief.

Those over 65 constitute a literal — or biological — old-age group. But
an even more serious situation is arising from the presence of a sort
of pseudo-old-age group — the occupationally aged — those who are over
the age of 35, and especially over 40, who find it ever more difficult,
except in a period of extraordinary industrial activity, to secure employ-
ment solely because of their age. A few years ago Walter Pitkin created
a sensation by writing a suggestive book entitled Life Begins at Forty.
But those who better their condition after 40 are rare and fortunate
individuals in American society. A survey of employment conditions
in New York State showed that very few firms in any important form
of private economic enterprise were willing to hire workers over 35 years
of age. Forty was found to be an upper-age deadline for taking on new
employees, which no important industry failed to respect. Some banks
actually had an upper age limit of 20 years for bank clerks who were
to be taken in and trained.

Many persons over 35 or 40 do retain their jobs until far past this age.
But, if they lose their positions, they find it almost impossible to get
new jobs. Moreover it has been repeatedly shown that they are more
likely to be discharged if they are over forty. Appalling as it may seem,

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 157

therefore, the great majority of Americans face the prospect of being
unable to secure new employment after 40, and many of them after 35,
except in periods of unusual industrial activity or unless they are given
various forms of relief jobs by local, state, or federal agencies. Chan-
ning Pollock states the economic implications of this outrageous situa-
tion:

One-third of our population is over 40 years old; no work for anyone over
40 would mean pensioning or starving as many people as live in the States of
New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Ohio, and Penn-
sylvania— almost the entire commonwealth of France. Only 31.75 per cent of us
are between 20 and 40, so that anything approaching a universal decision that
this is the span of industrial usefulness involves the requirement that 38,000,000
of us shall feed, clothe and house the remaining 87,000,000.

The whole idea is as fantastic as it is inhumanly cruel and economically
unsound. Common sense tells us that, with ordinary care of his body and
cultivation of his intelligence, the average man should be at his best around 40.
For labor requiring skill, judgment, and competence, those first 40 years might
well be regarded as preparatory — 20 years of schooling, 20 years of apprentice-
ship, and graduation into fitness to cope with the perplexities of breadwinning.28

At the very moment when persons over 35 or 40 are being thrown out
of work because of their age, and when many thousands of others are
unemployed because of labor-saving machinery, the gainful employment
of hundreds of thousands of children in industry is particularly repre-
hensible. At the present time, 46 states have a nominal minimum
age of 14 for full-time employment in industry, but 8 of these states
provide exemptions which nullify, in practice, the 14-year-old limit.
Some of the states, like Ohio, have admirable protection against child
labor. Ohio prescribes a 16-year minimum for all occupations. In
only two states is child labor legislation practically absent. Since
public opinion in the culprit states will not bring about remedial legisla-
tion, there has been strong pressure for federal legislation against child
labor. So, a federal law was passed in 1916 excluding from interstate
commerce goods produced by child labor. The Supreme Court declared
the law unconstitutional. Then another law was passed by Congress
in 1919, proposing to tax the profits of establishments employing chil-
dren. But this was declared unconstitutional in 1922.

Despairing of getting adequate legislation through the gauntlet of the
Supreme Court, Congress adopted a constitutional amendment in April,
1924, giving Congress the power to "limit, regulate, and prohibit the
labor of persons under 18 years of age." Ratification by the states
proceeded very slowly. By 1938 only 28 states had ratified it. The
strongest force opposing ratification has been the reactionary element
within the Roman Catholic Church, which appears to fear the possible
political influence on children under 18 which the amendment might con-
fer upon public authorities. Liberal Catholics, like Father John A.
Ryan, have, however, been among the most ardent supporters of the

28 "Death Begins at Forty," The Forum, November, 1937.

158 CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

amendment. However, if there should not be sufficient liberal and re-
form pressure in the country to bring about the ratification of the
amendment, the Supreme Court, now that it has taken on a more liberal
cast, may approve a really effective federal law suppressing child labor.
The Wages and Hours Act of 1938 outlaws child labor on goods sold in
interstate commerce.

The Outlook for Capitalism in the United States

It is symptomatic of the present weaknesses in the terminal stages of
capitalism that various students of the system find a number of defects,
each one regarded by the particular school of criticism as adequate to
undermine capitalism. Thurman Arnold, in his Bottlenecks of Business,
finds that monopolistic practices, the restriction of output, and the
maintenance of high price levels are ruining capitalism. Other econ-
omists, notably J. M. Keynes and Alvin H. Hansen, contend that capital-
ism is being undermined because too much profit is saved, as depreciation
reserves, to be reinvested in the capital plant, which can already turn
out more goods than can be purchased by the masses. They advocate
great public works projects and a greater diversion of business profits
into wages. Another school, mainly critics of finance capitalism, con-
tend that capitalism is being hurried to extinction through speculative
manipulations by corporate management at the expense of absentee
owners. Among these writers are Berle and Means, Lewis Corey, John
T. Flynn, and Max Lowcnthal. They stress the fundamental antagonism
between current financial practices and sound business policies.

Another group of writers, including such strange bedfellows as Stuart
B. Chase and Herbert Hoover, find that the chief evil of capitalism is
the enormous waste of the system, both in production and distribution.
If we could stop waste, capitalism might endure for generations. Other
writers, notably socialist critics, hold that capitalism is doomed mainly
by the hogging of the national income by the rich at the top of the
economic pyramid. This results in the restriction of mass purchasing
power, leading to so-called overproduction and threatening a general
breakdown of the capitalistic system. Technocratic critics like Walter
Rautenstrauch believe that capitalism is incompetent today because it
is directed by the archaic outlook and technique of the money-maker
rather than by the efficient and economical procedure of the industrial
engineer.28

The problems of capitalism seemed to be temporarily solved as a result
of the stimulation of industrial enterprise by the preparedness program
and our entry into the second World War. But, in Buenos Aires, back
in 1936, President Roosevelt himself warned against trusting to arma-
ment industries:

29 Probably the most comprehensive criticism of the capitalistic economic system
in a single volume is John Blair's Seeds of Destruction, Covici, Friede, 1938.

CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS 159

We know too that vast armaments are rising on every side and that the work
of creating them employs men and women by the millions. It is natural, how-
ever, for us to conclude that such employment is false employment; that it
builds no permanent structures and creates no consumers' goods for the main-
tenance of a lasting prosperity. We know that nations guilty of these follies
inevitably face the day when either their weapons of destruction must be used
against their neighbors, or when an unsound economy, like a house of cards, will
fall apart.

Whatever temporary stimulus to industry and capitalism may come
from preparedness and war, it must end when the war ceases, accom-
panied by greatly increased debts and the problem of demobilizing mil-
lions of soldiers and reabsorbing them in industrial enterprise. More-
over, there is the grave danger that wartime regimentation may hold
over indefinitely into peacetime and give us a permanent system of
state capitalism which will bring to an end the system of private
capitalism..

CHAPTER VI

The Institution of Property in the Light
of Sociology and History

Basic Definitions and Concepts

PROPERTY is a complicated legal concept and social usage, involving
both things which are owned and the right of ownership thereof. And
there are a multiplicity of types of property and modes of property hold-
ing. The Universal Dictionary thus defines property in the sense of the
right of possession:

The exclusive right of possessing, enjoying, and disposing of anything; owner-
ship. It may be a right unlimited in point of duration, and unrestricted in point
of disposition, or a right limited in duration, as a life interest.

One of the most famous definitions of property as the right of posses-
sion is given by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws
of England:

The third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of property;
which consists in the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all his acquisitions,
without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land, which are
extremely watchful in ascertaining and protecting this right.

Another way of looking at property is to regard it as a thing which is
oWned, according to well established property rights. Viewed in this
sense, property is defined in the Universal Dictionary as follows:

That which is held by such a right; that which is owned; that to which a
person has the legal title, whether it is in his possession or not.

A. G. Keller has pointed out that nearly all forms of property emerge,
in practice, only when there is competition for possession. For example,
Robinson Crusoe had no property until Friday appeared on the scene.
As Stephen Pfeil observes, "The relation of ownership is not a relation
between the man and the thing but between him and other men, whom
he excludes from, and to whom he gives, possession. Property is an
'exclusive1 right and where there are no people to exclude, the right cannot
exist."

160

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 161

The great diversity of property concepts and holdings has been well
indicated by Walton H. Hamilton:

Property is a euphonious collocation of letters which serves as a general term
for the miscellany of equities that persons hold in the commonwealth. A coin,
a lance, a tapestry, a monastic vow, a yoke of oxen, a female slave, an award of
alimony, a homestead, a first mortgage, a railroad system, a preferred list and a
right of contract are all to be discovered within the catholic category. Each of
these terms, meaningless in itself, is a token or focus of a scheme of relationships ;
each has its support in sanction and repute; each is an aspect of an enveloping
culture. A Maori claiming his share of the potato crop, a Semitic patriarch
tending his flock, a devout abbot lording it vicariously over fertile acres, a Yankee
captain homeward bound with black cargo, an amateur general swaggering a
commission he has bought, an adventurous speculator selling futures in a grain
he has never seen and a commissar clothed with high office in a communistic
state are all men of property. In fact, property is as heterogeneous as the
societies within which it is found, in idea, it is as cosmopolitan as the systems of
thought by which it is explained.1

One fundamental division of property is that between tangible and
intangible. Tangible property is made up of concrete things — land or
movable chattels of any type, such as livestock, tools, implements,
jewelry, or money. Intangible property is constituted mainly of legal
rights to certain uses and privileges, such as copyrights, patent rights,
or good-will.

Property is also divided into real property and personal property.
Real property includes land, buildings, and other immovable objects,
while personal property is made up mainly of movable chattels, such as
goods, or money. In a broad way, the distinction between real and per-
sonal property is that between immovable and movable objects. As
Blackstone observes, "Things personal are goods, money, and all other
movables which may attend the owner's person wherever he thinks proper
to go." In a large view of the subject, intangible property is an attenu-
ated and legalistic phase of personal property.

We ordinarily think of property as possessed by an individual, in other
words, private property. But property concepts and practices are far
wider than this. Property may be owned not only by individuals but
also by groups. In fact, during the greater part of man's existence, prop-
erty was owned by groups of different sizes and types rather than by
private persons. We ordinarily look upon the various emotions connected
with property as being of a highly personal sort, but primitive clans and
tribes, ancient city-states, or contemporary fraternal organizations, may
have just as specific and passionate notions of property rights as any
individual miser.

The average layman regards ownership and possession as essentially
the same thing, but they are quite different legal concepts. Even lawyers
fall into error when they hold that ownership is a relation of law and

1 Article, "Property," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 12, pp.
528-529.

162 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

possession a relation of fact. Ownership means that a person has all
the legal rights which relate to the object owned and that all necessary
facts exist to support this right of ownership. In other words, ownership
is a complex of rights supporting possession, whether actual or not.
In modern law possession means a direct physical relation to the object
possessed, power over this object, and intent to exclude others from any
similar contact and power. Viewed broadly, ownership and possession
are both legal relations, but ownership is more the passive right while
possession is both a legal right and an active physical fact.

It is often assumed that property is a creature of law but, in reality,
laws have grown out of pre-existing property practices and usages and
constitute a rationalization and perpetuation of social customs relating
to use and possession. At the same time, law has tended to legalize and
stabilize such social usages.

In primitive times, property rights were controlled primarily by custom
and usage rather than by written law. But this did not prevent property
rights from being often very precise and supported with vigor. In the
ancient Near East, private property became well developed, and prop-
erty rights and usages were embodied in written law as well as in custom
and convention. In the Code of Hammurabi, the great king of Babylonia
about 2000 B.C., we find a most elaborate legal recognition and regulation
of many kinds of property, with special protection given to various forms
of contracts. There seems to be good evidence that the Egyptians may
have had a comparable legal code.

Many of our more important legal concepts in regard to property grew
out of Roman law. Fundamental in early Roman law was the distinc-
tion between res mancipiae, or a Roman farm and its equipment, even
including slaves, and other property, such as merchandise. The res
mancipiae was regarded as more dignified and important property than
other holdings, and could only be disposed of by means of a ceremonial
contract or mancipium. By including in the basic concept of res man-
cipiae both real property and movable chattels, Roman law tended to
blur the distinction between real and personal property. Roman law
also created the distinction between ownership, or proprietasy and pos-
session, or dominium. Roman law envisaged many other subtle legal
concepts and rights relating to property holdings.

In medieval law, the distinction between possession and ownership was
less distinct, but the differentiation between real property and chattels
was made more thorough and decisive than it had been in Roman law.
Real property could be acquired in most places only by inheritance or
investiture, both of which were closely controlled by feudal law. Investi-
ture was an elaborate feudal rite, both legal and religious. The inherit-
ance of property in the Middle Ages usually followed the principle of
primogeniture, or inheritance by the eldest male heir. The possession
of real property in England in the Middle Ages was guaranteed by the
right of seisin, which was then regarded as the possession of such an
estate in land as was believed worthy to be held by a free man. In

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 163

England today the possession of a freehold is frequently regarded as the
right of seisin.

Perhaps the outstanding development in property law since the dawn
of modern times has been that which clearly distinguishes between real
and personal property:

The main differences between real and personal property which still exist in
England are these. (1) In real property there can be nothing more than limited
ownership; there can be no estate properly so called in personal property, and
it may be held in complete ownership. There is nothing corresponding to an
estate-tail in personal property; words which in real property would create an
estate-tail will give an absolute interest in personalty. A life-interest may,
however, be given in personalty, except in articles quae ipso usu consummuntur.
Limitations of personal property, equally with those of real property, fall within
the rule against perpetuities. (2) Personal property is not subject to various
incidents of real property, such as rent, dower or escheat. (3) On the death of
the owner intestate real property descends to the heir; personal property is
divided according to the Statute of Distributions. (4) Real property as a
general rule must be transferred by deed; personal property does not need so
solemn a mode of transfer. (5) Contracts relating to real property must be
in writing by the Statutes of Frauds, 29 Car. II.c.3,s.4; contracts relating to
personal property need only be in writing when it is expressly so provided by
statute as, for instance, in the cases falling under s.17 of the Statute of Frauds.
(6) A will of lands need not be proved, but a will of personalty or of personal
and real property together must be proved in order to give a title to those claim-
ing under it. (7) Devises of real estate fall as a rule within the Mortmain
Acts; bequests of personal property, other than chattels real, are not within the
act. (8) Mortgages of real property need not generally be registered; mortgages
of personal property for the most part require registration under the Bills of
Sale Acts.2

In the last half-century there have been revolutionary alterations in
both the law and concepts of property rights, especially in the United
States. These have been associated chiefly with the rise of corporations,
the holding-company, and the speculative practices of finance capitalism.
As a result of these developments, ownership of much of American business
has been divorced from control and management, and those who have
been vested with control through legal legerdemain have been able to
ride roughshod over the owners of securities.

During this recent period — chiefly since 1870 — a sweeping legal revo-
lution also took place with respect to property. Property rights have
come to be looked upon as sacred. Therefore, those who had any special
vested practice, interest, or privilege attempted to identify it with prop-
erty and thus secure for it impregnable legal defense. This led to an
enormous — indeed, absurd — extension of the property concept in law.
Such things as monopoly, factory codes, sales practices, working condi-
tions, the open-shop, immunity from taxation, and so on, were taken un-
der the cloak of property and were given special protection by the courts.

2 James Williams, article, "Personal Property," Encyclopedia Britannica, llth Ed.,
Vol. 21, p. 256. See also Charles Gore (Ed.), Property: Its Duties and Rights,
Macmillan, 1932, Chap. VIII.

164 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

Some Psychological Foundations of Property

A wide-spread notion prevails- even among some professional psycholo-
gists that the property emotions and practices of mankind rest upon a
definite acquisitive or property instinct, which not only dominates man-
kind but is also to be found among lower forms of life, such as insects,
birds, rodents, and apes. Such psychologists as William McDougall,
W. H. R. Rivers, and others have supported this theory by citing the
foraging activities of the bees, wasps and ants, their accumulation of food,
and their building of nests. Similar traits among birds and rodents are
further adduced to support the instinct theory of the origins of property.

Perhaps the most convincing exposure of this instinct hypothesis is the
book, Property: A Study in Social Psychology, by Ernest Beaglehole, an
able English psychologist. He investigated thoroughly all the evidence
usually brought forth to support the idea of a so-called property or
acquisitive instinct among insects, birds, and animals and concludes that
this evidence does not vindicate any such interpretation.3 With respect
to the insects, Beaglehole concludes that:

If such accumulating activity (in one case, to repeat, the provisioning of the
individual nest, in the other case, foraging for food and other objects of value
to the hive and nest) must be fitted into a limited classification of instincts of
the McDougall type it is far more reasonably and scientifically subsumed by an
instinct of 'nutrition' or 'food-gathering' than by an instinct of 'acquisition/ or
even, perhaps, as a modification or extension of an 'instinct of hunting/ 4

Among birds, food accumulation is the exception rather than the rule,
and the collection of materials other than those used for food or nests is
found only among rare and very intelligent birds. The defense of a mate,
young, or a nest is related more closely to sex, nutrition, building drives,
and parental impulses than to any acquisitive instinct. Beaglehole con-
cludes: "These facts take on a legitimate and larger meaning only when
they are considered within a configuration which comprise a total activity
directed towards the satisfaction of sexual and parental impulses." 5

The same sort of reasoning applies to the evidence with respect to an
acquisitive instinct among animals. Insofar as animals accumulate and
defend, it is only because the objects that they do accumulate and defend
satisfy general life desires. As Beaglehole puts it: "The psychological
origin of property is based on the mental and material appropriation of
those objects which are necessary for the satisfaction of those specific
instincts subserving the more fundamental needs of the organism."6

In short, the tendency to acquire and defend objects by insects, birds,
and animals rests upon a complex set of drives to satisfy life needs rather
than upon any specific instinct of acquisition. Beaglehole concludes then

8 Loc. cit.t Macmillan, 1932, Chaps." ii-iv.
* Ibid., p. 62.
*Ibid., p. 93.
*lbid., p. 123

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 165

that there is no instinct of acquisition -to be found in forms of organic
life lower than man and that the resemblance between the acquisitive
behavior of man and of other lower forms of life is wholly superficial.
There is no organic, psychological, or historical link between the accumu-
lating tendencies of lower forms of animal life and the acquisitive be-
havior of man. This is also the opinion of Professor Hamilton, who says
that "a suspicious analogue alone enables man to find property in the
animal kingdom."

After investigating the rise of property drives among men Beaglehole
is also convinced that what we find in mankind is socially conditioned
acquisitive behavior and not an acquisitive instinct:

The roots of acquisitive behaviour are to be found in the primitive impulse
to grasp and to handle in the interests of the fundamental needs; collecting
behaviour is a habit complex whereby, on the one hand, the undisciplined and
non-regimented character of the child's impulses is organized into a compact
body of interests through play activities and participation in a social group; and
on the other hand, in conformity with group values, with developing intellectual
interests.7

With adults in well developed society acquisitive behavior is motivated
not only by the immediate needs of the -organism but by many complex
factors of a psychological and cultural nature:

The dominant motives to wealth accumulation would thus seem to be prudence,
the love of family, the desire for social esteem and invidious distinctions founded
on wealth, and lastly, desire for power, and the aggressive control of others.
The desire for economic goods, therefore, the response to the bribe of wealth, is
always complex. It is a value supported by a strongly organized system of
sentiments and interests, the joint product of the interaction of impulse and
emotion with the economic culture patterns of the material and social environ-
ment. So important, however, is this group patterning that it is hardly unfair
to say that man is acquisitive because his environment makes him so.8

We may, therefore, conclude that the drive to accumulate property is
a complex one, which does not rest on any simple instinct of acquisition.
There seems no valid support for the existence of any such instinct in man
or other living beings. The impulse to accumulate, use, and own things
is a complicated sentiment, involving everything from the grasping of
the babe at warm and familiar objects to the lust for emulation and
prestige on the part of "economic royalists" in our era of finance capi-
talism.

Property Drives in the Light of Psychology,
Ethnology, and Sociology

In addition to satisfying some basic requirements of life, property
values are conditioned by the social and cultural setting. Things are
valuable in proportion to the esteem placed upon them in any culture.

7 Beaglehole, op. dt., p. 281.
*Ibid., p. 308.

166 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

' When culture changes, property usages and values are likely to undergo
a comparable transformation:

From the point of view of social theory, after allowance is made for this con-
ception of the psychological minimum, one must argue that property is neither
unchanging nor indefeasible. It is, in reality, an instrument, expedient or con-
vention, adaptable and changing in accordance with varying needs (just as is any
expedient), and must be so changed, if needs are to be satisfied, in conformity
with the requirements of a dynamic society. The truth of this statement gains
support from even the most cursory glance at the history of Western Europe.
This history shows very clearly a gradual development in the culture patterning
of property values.9

A. G. Keller also emphasizes the fact that the property interest is
sharply conditioned by the relative group esteem for the objects in ques-
tion and by the utility which these objects possess in any particular cul-
ture:

Certain things may be desirable as property to some people and not to others;
for instance, the iron and coal deposits in America did not interest the Indians
at all, though they now form properties of great desirability and value. The
Eskimo who traded some fine furs for a handful of wet matches with red sticks,
was eager to own what the white man was just about to throw away as useless.10

A particularly brilliant and impressive statement of the cultural de-
termination of property values is provided by Professor Hamilton :

The mark of a particular society always attaches to a property. An owner
is concerned with trinket, vineyard or power, not for what it is in itself, but for
what the community allows him to extract from it. In one society a string of
scalps are a badge of honor, in another a mere reminder of the ways of savages.
The touch of superstition gives value to a rabbit's foot, the bone of a reputed
saint and Dr. Wiseman's Panacea-for-Everyill ; at the coming of science their
places are taken by the test tube and the guinea pig. The march of invention
subdues waste land with dry farming, converts a flash of lightning into a great
industry, and keeps the catalogue of natural resources in perpetual flux. In one
age a moral revolution outlaws the theater, in another it consigns the traffic in
alcoholic beverages to oblivion. Under industrialism the fact of property is as
fresh as the morning newspaper, the ticker tape and the latest judicial utterance.11

The powerful social and cultural conditioning of property values may
be illustrated in greater detail. Vanity is a very important source of the
property desire. In primitive society, most things, from personal orna-
ments to wives, are likely to be esteemed not only for their utility or magic
potency but also for the prestige which they may confer. This vanity
drive has continued, and in its modern manifestation it has been made
the subject of sardonic analysis by Thorstein Veblen and other writers
interested in the social psychology of our contemporary leisure classes.
One of our present day plutocrats may get much the same satisfaction
out of a marble castle on Long Island that the savage secures from his

8 Beaglehole, op. cit., p. 317.

10 A. G. Keller, Starting Points in Social Science, Ginn, 1925, p. 82.

11 Hamilton, loc cit.t p. 529,

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 167

string of shells. "Diamond Jim" Brady was motivated by much the
same sentiments which promoted the lavish personal adornment of King
Luernus of the ancient Gauls.

The possessiveness exhibited by males with respect to their women
arises from psychologically complex motives. The desire for women is
supported not only by sex requirements and by their utility in the house-
hold, but also by sentiments of affection, fear of loss, jealousy, self-love
or egotism. Even polygyny, or the possession of many wives, rests as
much upon vanity and prestige as upon the lasciviousness of the sheik.

Property is accumulated and prized as much because it bestows power
and prestige upon the possessor as for its practical utility. This applies
even to a utilitarian matter such as the accumulation of food. It is com-
mon among primitive peoples to find food accumulated and displayed
beyond any capacity for consumption, because this display of excess food
demonstrates prestige and superior rank. Even ornaments are as defi-
nitely related to the desire for social prestige as to any aesthetic impulse
or personal pride of the wearer. Expensive and unusual adornment gives
evidence that the wearer is a person of social importance and high rank.

The possession of land is usually regarded as a preeminent example
of utilitarian motivation, but it is a far more complex matter than this.
It rests also upon tradition, association with the family past, and aesthetic
achievement. Indeed, considered in the large, the desire to possess land
is a complex sentiment rather than a direct utilitarian impulse:

Over and above means of subsistence and the fulfilment of social obligations
one must recognize the large part that other psychological factors play in the
formation of values in land. Aesthetic appreciation, memories of former years,
tribal battles, sacred practices, memories of home and family — in fact all those
interests which are the resultant of the interplay of social sympathy with tradi-
tional teaching and aesthetic emotion combine to create a sentiment of ownership
for the land.12

Religion has been a profound influence in creating property values
and sentiments. Primitive magic has an especially powerful effect. Not
only is magic force supposed to reside in various amulets and other ob-
jects, giving rise to that religious concept we know as fetishism, but
one's personality is supposed to project itself into the objects he pos-
sesses and uses. Hence it is unsafe to seize or use the possessions of
others, lest this magic potency do one harm. It was this notion which,
in part, underlay the idea of burial with one's possessions. This elimi-
nated the danger of having any survivor use them with disastrous results.
Wealth also enabled the possessor to feel more certain of a satisfactory
existence in the world to come, for it enabled him to gain the assistance
of medicine men and priests in utilizing the aid of supernatural powers.
Benefactions for holy causes were supposed to be particularly potent in
assuring immortal bliss. Indeed, in the later Middle Ages, wealthy per-
sons were assumed to be able to purchase partial immunity from damna-

12 Beaglehole, op. cit., pp. 154-155.

168 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

tion. This stimulated the notorious sale of indulgences. The power of
wealth over contemporary religion has stimulated many sociological and
economic studies and powerful social novels, an example of which is
Winston Churchill's The Inside of the Cup.

One can multiply indefinitely these illustrations of the way in which
social, psychological, and ethnographical factors influence property values
and usages, but those we have given will suffice to demonstrate the
assertion that property motives are extremely complex and are sweep-
ingly altered in the course of social evolution. Those who wish further
information may consult the third and fourth chapters of Sumner's Folk-
ways, and the more detailed treatment in the Science of Society by
Sumner and Keller.18

Some Outstanding Phases of the History of Property

Property in Primitive Society. The nature of property usages and
holdings in primitive society has been a subject of much controversy.1*
One school of ethnology and sociology has sought to demonstrate that in
primitive society we always find a system of communism, where all prop-
erty is held in common by various social groups, such as clans and tribes.
Another school of thought, chiefly concerned with upholding the dogma
of the sanctity of private property, has combatted this notion of primi-
tive communism by contending that private property has been the rule
in primitive as well as in historic cultures.

Neither the thesis of complete communism in primitive society nor the
opposed dogma of the universality of private holdings among primitive
men accords with the facts. While communal holdings certainly pre-
dominated in primitive life, there was plenty of private property, extend-
ing even to abstruse types of intangible rights. Often in the case of
what passes for communal ownership it was communal possession and
use rather than strict communal ownership. There was a rather general
trend during primitive times from communal to family holding, and
movable objects usually became private property:

Although it is difficult to find among primitive peoples complete approach to a
communistic grouping of society, yet it is equally evident that various factors
converge to bring about a fairly equable distribution of wealth within the enlarged
family group, the clan, or the tribe. Even in the higher grade agricultural
societies, where we first find the phenomena accompanying the differentiation of
classes, the rise of nobles and chiefs, we find evidence for the existence of group
patterns which stress the social approval of generosity, of giving rather than
keeping, and which thus promote equality of wealth. Culture patterns may
stress the virtue of liberality; or the glory accruing to the group through tempo-
rary possession of Kula objects of incalculable value. And human nature does
not rebel. It moulds its individualism into conformity with social ways of acting,
its sentiments of ownership to group patterns of behaviour. The result is society
without abnormal acquisitiveness, without clear-cut communism but co-operative,

« Especially Vol. I, Part I.

14 On the evolution of property, see Gore, op. cit., Chap. I.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 169

combining, through its customs, individual initiative with a not unequal dis-
tribution of wealth.15

This general point of view is supported by the eminent ethnologist,
Professor Robert H. Lowie, in his chapter on "Property" in his notable
Primitive Society:

It follows from the foregoing that we cannot content ourselves with a blunt
alternative: communism versus individualism. A people may be communistic as
regards one type of goods, yet recognize separate ownership with respect to other
forms of property. Further, the communistic principle may hold not for the
entire political unit of however high or low an order but only within the con-
fines of a much smaller or differently constituted class of individuals, in which
case there will be indeed collectivism but not communism in the proper sense
of the term. These points must be kept in mind when surveying successively
the primitive law of immovable and movable property, of immaterial wealth
and of inheritance.16

In dealing with property in primitive society one must remember that
we have no evidence of property usages among any very early type of
men. Existing savages, and peoples who lived just before the dawn of
history, represent relatively recent stages of human culture. Man
had passed through nearly a million years of experience before he reached
the stage of culture represented by, let us say, the American Indians at
the time of the discovery of America. So, when we talk about property
among primitive peoples, we do not mean early primitive peoples but
those living in a relatively late and advanced state of primitive culture.

In a rough way, the extent and fixity of private property increased as
man passed from the hunting period, through pastoral life, to agriculture.
But there were plenty of private property rights in the hunting period
and a good deal of communal control and use of property after agriculture
appeared.

In the so-called hunting and fishing stage of culture — the economy of
collectors — hunting and fishing lands were normally owned or controlled
by the whole social group, while individuals owned their own weapons
and tools. The ownership of the latter, rested, as we have seen, on magi-
cal as well as ultilitarian grounds. But not even hunting grounds were
always communally owned. Among the Veddas of Ceylon, for example,
private property rights in hunting lands were so specific that a man did
not dare to hunt even on his brother's land without permission.

Among peoples living in the pastoral period, what we usually find is
communal ownership of the pasture land and private ownership of live-
stock, though often this ownership of livestock is vested in the family
rather than in the individual members.

The appearance of agriculture promoted a marked development of
private ownership. This was due to the fact that land had to be cleared

is Beaglehole, op. cit., p. 237.

16 Lowie, op. cit., Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1920, p. 210. For more detail
on primitive property, see M. J. Herskovits, The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples,
Knopf, 1940, Part IV.

170 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

for tilling, and those who cleared and cultivated it were loath to sur-
render the product of their effort to the community:

It is when we come to tillage that the typical property-system as respects land
undergoes a decided change. . . . Under agnculture the whole situation as
respects land is altered. It is still the product of the land rather than the land
itself that is the object of desire; but now some small areas of land are better
than others, \vhereas on the hunting and herding stages there was small choice
between limited plots. One piece of tillage-land is, perhaps, naturally more
fertile than another, even though the two are small and lie side by side. But
tillage-land must generally have been improved, by being cleared of trees a-nd
underbrush and otherwise prepared for cultivation, and sometimes enriched with
ashes, fish, or other fertilizer. When this has been done, the holder of such land
is not willing to give it up for any other piece; especially if the ground contains
seed which lie has planted, does it become a special and individual thing, of
which he wants the private monopoly.17

With the coming of agriculture the old communal system of ownership
did not wholly disappear. Waste land, used for pasturage, almost always
remained under communal ownership. There was also often a communal
control of tilled land, though there was a definite tendency towards the
growth of family or individual ownership of cultivated plots. In the
agricultural period, private property in animals and tools was the usual
thing. Among advanced primitive peoples we often find that the land
is regarded as the "chief's land" or the "king's land." In this way, the
ground was prepared for the transition from primitive to historical cul-
ture. In the early stages of the latter we usually find that the land was,
in legal theory, in the possession of the monarch and distributed among
his followers.

In primitive society we find that movable objects of real or supposed
utility, such as weapons, tools, and animals, were most frequently owned
by families or individuals. Private property was the rule in this area of
human possession. The elements of magic, utility, convenience, and
pride all combined to stimulate the growth of private ownership:

In general it may be said that among primitive peoples in regard to the
ownership of implements, weapons and land, what is acquired or made by a
m'an or woman by personal exertion is regarded as his or her private property.
Similarly what is acquired or made through combined labour of a group is usually
the common property of the individuals forming the group.

The psychological elements involved in a sentiment of ownership supporting
property, the acquisition of which has involved the mixing of labour, are not far
to seek. In the making of a tool or weapon or a house there is the satisfaction
of the impulse to construction; in the decoration or carving of the implement
there is aesthetic pleasure and joy in good craftsmanship. Memory of the energy,
time and labour spent in fashioning the tool from raw materials strengthens the
feelings of satisfaction at having produced something of this that is useful or
beautiful and perhaps both, Since an object of this nature may be envied or
praised by other members of the group, the sentiments grouped round the self
are proportionately strengthened and reinforce in their turn those feelings
centred about the newly created object. . . .

n Keller, Starting Points in Social Science, Ginn, pp. 86-87.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 171

Factors of utility, rarity, durability and incorporation of skill are by no means
the sole and only determinants of value and desire for possession. Other, and
perhaps more potent, factors are the outcome of motives grouped round the drive
of vanity, the desire for social recognition, and the fact that value is often the
outcome of what, for want of a better term, I may call 'historic sentimentalism.' 18

Women, as well as men, frequently owned movable objects in primitive
times. This was especially the case where, as among the Iroquois, women
occupied a position of unusual prestige and power.

An especially striking refutation of the idea that property notions and
rights are only slightly developed among primitive peoples is afforded by
the extensive evidence of incorporeal property and intangible rights.19
Among these intangible property rights, usually the possession of indi-
viduals, are such things as songs, magic formulas and incantations, local
legends, poems, the right to make carvings and other ornamental works,
religious rites, ceremonial privileges, the cultivation of sacred herbs, and
the revelation of visions. Among some primitive peoples we find notions
and usages identical with our concept of copyrights and patent rights.

Property in the Ancient Near East. With the so-called dawn of history
in the ancient Near East property usages and rights were embodied in
formal legislation and enforced by the absolutism of the ancient mon-
archs. These early historic civilizations of the Near East were built upon
the ruins of primitive culture, which was brought to an end by many
centuries of wars of conquest. The monarchs who ruled over the new
states usually claimed the formal ownership of the land and embodied
their claim in laws and proclamations. But they gave out the land to
their followers in the form of gifts and leases which conferred most of
the salient points of ownership of private property. The chief limitation
was that very often such lands could not be disposed of with the same
degree of freedom that prevails under a system of complete private
ownership.

There were many changes in the property system in the course of the
history of ancient Egypt.20 In the Old Kingdom we find a hangover
of primitive customs. There was a persistence of communal ownership
of land along with private ownership of flocks and tools. In the crafts,
private ownership of tools was the normal thing. As the kings grew
stronger, they tended to assert their ownership over all the land of Egypt
and to give it out in leaseholds. But the nobles were able to dispose of
such holdings if they obtained the king's consent.

This situation of formal legal ownership of all lands by the Pharaoh,
its subsequent redistribution to nobles, and the freedom of the latter to
dispose of their holdings with royal permission continued with no im-
portant changes in principle throughout the Middle Kingdom and the
Empire. The Egyptian priesthood owned vast sections of the best land

is Beaglehole, op. cit., pp. 147, 183.

19Lowie, op. cit., pp. 235 ff., and Herskovits, op. cit., pp. 348 ff.
20 See Alexandra Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, Knopf, 1927, pp. 13&-
140, 144, 265-267, 347-348.

172 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

of Egypt. This was owned under a communal religious set-up and was
relatively free from royal interference, except in the case of the strongest
monarchs. It might be pointed out, in passing, that the priests were
the largest slave owners in ancient Egypt.

In the earliest days of ancient Mesopotamia — the Sumerian era — we
find well-developed property rights, both communal and private:

In Sumer and Akkad, from the earliest times, property in land was vested in
individuals, or in social groups; pre-Sargonic deeds of sale afford precious evi-
dence for this. The temples had their fields and their orchards; the ishakku's
wife and children their private lands. The little house of the poor man was not
always immune from the greed of the rich, and his mother's plot was too often
plundered by the priest. Already, apparently, the prince rewarded his faithful
servants by grants of land, either in perpetuity, or simply in usufruct.21

In Babylonia, the king theoretically owned much of the land and gave
it out, as had the Egyptian Pharaoh, to his loyal followers. Both the
city-states and individuals owned land. Weapons, tools, and implements
were usually owned privately by all those who had the means to obtain
them. Only those too poor to provide their own movable objects pooled
their resources and owned them communally. The Code of Hammurabi
distinguished between private property and ilku possessions. The latter
were granted by the king as a reward for public services, and could not
be seized, mortgaged, or sold except after the fulfillment of required duties
and with royal consent. Even the disposition of private property was
restricted by family rights and, as a rule, could be alienated only for
debt. The high value put upon property rights in the Code of Ham-
murabi is demonstrated by the severe penalties imposed for the violation
of contract.

In Assyria, there was both communal and private ownership of land.
The cities often owned vast rural properties and leased or sold them to
private individuals. Frequently, large farms were owned by several
individuals or families. Assyrian legislation was particularly strict with
respect to boundary rights. A man dishonestly moving his boundary, if
discovered, was compelled to make restitution of three times the area
taken, to be whipped, and to work for a month for the king without pay.
He might also be mutilated.

The Hebrew ideas of property emphasized the principle of social justice,
stressed the fact that man is the "steward of God" in all that he holds,
and held that property should be so used as to promote the good both of
the owner and his group.22

Property in Greece and Rome. Homeric society in ancient Greece
represented a transition from primitive to historic culture, and there was
a definite tendency towards the increase of private ownership of land:

We are in a time when groups of the patriarchal type, smaller families, and
isolated individuals all exist together, when collective ownership continues to

21 L. Delaporte, Mesopotamia, Knopf, 1925, p. 101.
22 C/. Gore, op. cit., Chap. IV.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 173

exist by the side of personal ownership, when vast estates are surrounded by
medium-sized fields and small plots, and when movable wealth allows industry
to put in a timid appearance.23

In early Attica, a family system of land ownership predominated but
individual ownership was already making strong headway. In the
Periclean period in Athens, the formal system which prevailed was one
of private property, under the general control and supervision of Athens:

This, at bottom, was the principle which governed ownership. Property
belonged to the individual, under the control of the city. There was neither
communism nor anarchy. The maintenance of each in what belonged to him,
under conditions determined by the law — no system could be imagined more
favourable to society. All goods were at the disposal of the State without
belonging to it slavishly, and its demands detracted nothing from the pride or
activity of the citizen.24

The state owned most of the mines and quarries, though they fre-
quently leased out such public domains to private concerns in the form
of "concessions." Private property in both lands and tools predominated.
The laws governing the transmission of estates encouraged the division
of medium and small estates, until farms frequently became so small that
they could not support the owners. Great estates were built up on the
ruins of small holdings by a process something like that in which the
Roman latifundia were created upon the ruins of the old Roman free-
holds.

There was some capitalism in Athens, but it bore little resemblance
to that of modern times. Piracy and trade were put upon essentially
the same ethical plane. The slowness with which money was able to
assert itself as a form of property is revealed by the general opposition
to the taking of interest. All interest was branded as usury whatever
the rate charged.

The situation presented by Sparta was an unusual one.25 Sparta was
one of the first totalitarian states. Its social system was essentially one
of military socialism. The highest class in Sparta were the so-called
Spartiates. They were strictly organized according to the system of
military socialism. They occupied the so-called civic lands of Sparta,
which were divided into equal entailed and inalienable family estates.
There was equality of land holding and taxes. These estates were trans-
mitted through the system of primogeniture. The estates were cultivated
by helots, who were legally servile, but were often fairly well off in a
material sense. They bore a certain resemblance to the medieval serf.
The other free class in Sparta were the so-called Perioeci. They were
both farmers and city industrialists. They were not subjected to the
regimentation of military socialism, though they might often be called
upon for military service in time of emergency. They owned their

28 Gustave Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work, Knopf, 1926, p. 11.
™ Ibid., p. 151.

., pp. 87 ff.

174 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

own shops, tools, lands, and herds. Their property was alienable and
could be disposed of with relative freedom.

In early Rome, agricultural property was usually regarded as sacred.28
Agriculture was as much a phase of religious life as of economic activity.
In the earliest days there was much common landowning with private
property in herds and implements. The cities owned much land and city
ownership died slowly. When a city conquered adjoining lands it par-
celed out this area among citizens.

In the days of the kings and the early Republic we find a form of patri-
archal agrarian life, in which each family owned a little plot of land
called an hcredium, containing a little less than two acres. When Rome
conquered the Italian peninsula some of the conquered land was sold out-
right to private individuals. The rest was retained as public land which
the state rented out to private cultivators, either Roman citizens or con-
quered peoples.

This conquest of Italy and the subsequent conquest of the Mediter-
ranean world by Rome gradually brought to an end the era of small land-
holders. Many Roman farmers were killed off in war and the wealthy
element which survived and had profited by war bought up the land and
created the great estates or latifundia. This disappearance of a nation
of small landowners and free men is regarded by historians as the lead-
ing cause of the decline of Roman power.

Capitalism and monetary property developed much further in Rome
than they did in Greece. There were two main types of capitalists:
(1) those who worked for the government as tax-collectors and on public
works, and (2) ordinary businessmen. Great fortunes grew up, some of
which were created by methods exactly paralleling our modern rackets
Crassus, in fact, may fairly be regarded as the father of the arson racket.

In the Roman Empire the masses were generally dispossessed, whether
in city or country. In the city, they usually lived on public largesse in
the form of "bread-and-circuses." In the country, they sank to the level
of serfs in the so-called colonate. In neither case did they have any
private possessions worthy of the name. The middle class was gradually
ruined by the taxation system. Those who had property were chiefly a
few great landholders, who defied most of the laws and dodged their
obligations to the state. The army was owned by the state and lived in
a condition which may be regarded as military socialism.

Property in the Middle Ages. It was long popular to find in early
German society a system of complete communism in landholding. But
today most up-to-date historians doubt that there was much outright
communal ownership of arable lands. It appears that the pasture and
woodland were owned by the community at large, but cultivated land was
only subject to communal control like the medieval manor. Each free
cultivator had a right to the land he worked and to its products, though

26 On Roman property, see Paul Louis, Ancient Rome at Work, Knopf, 1927,
pp. 17-20, 30-36, 51-56, 106, 121.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 175

he did not own it nor could he dispose of it. Private or family ownership
of weapons, tools, and herds seems to have been the rule.27

In theory, Christianity favored communal property, and the Apostolic
Christians set up a sort of primitive communism, while awaiting the ex-
pected second coming of Christ. Monastic communities for some time
supported a communal system of landholding. Stress was laid on the
dangers of accumulating too much private property, lest one become ab-
sorbed with this world's goods and neglect the exercises essential to insure
salvation in the world to come. Jesus had warned that, where a man's
treasure is, there also will his heart be. Wealth and property were to be
used only to supply elemental human needs, to glorify God, and to support
the Church. But this noble theory soon evaporated under the stress of
practical conditions in medieval life.

Land was far and away the most important type of property since the
civilization was overwhelmingly rural. The only person who might be
regarded as an outright owner of land was the king, or the superior feudal
lord who was not obligated to any overlord. But it was not uncommon
in the Middle Ages for even a king to hold land under obligations to some
feudal lord. The possession of land, known as the fief, was bestowed
by the practice of investiture. It was normally passed on through primo-
geniture, in order to keep the fief intact. But each fief carried respon-
sibilities to the overlord, such as military service or money payments.
If these obligations were not met, the overlord could, if he were strong
enough, dispossess the holder of the fief. A feudal lord was normally
invested with a fief as reward for military services already rendered.

The agricultural system of the Middle Ages revolved about the manor,
which might be roughly regarded as the fief viewed in its economic
aspects.28 A part of the manor — the demesne — was cultivated for the
lord by his serfs, and he received all the produce thereof. The rest of
the manor, known as land held in villeinage, was under communal con-
trol, but each serf had the right to cultivate certain sections of this area
and get the produce thereof. The serfs usually owned their own animals
and tools, but they generally had to pool these and use them in a cooper-
ative manner to carry on farming operations. Even their labor was not
their own, since they had to give approximately half their time for free
work on the lord's demesne. They could not dispose of their land, but
neither could they be thrown off the land. Flour mills and other needed
institutions were supplied by the lord, and the serfs paid for their use.

The Church entered actively into the feudal landholding system.
Bishops and abbots might be great feudal landlords. The vast tracts
of land owned by the monasteries were usually communally owned.
They might be worked by the monks, but monastic lands were also
frequently cultivated by serfs under conditions very similar to those
which existed on secular manors.

27 See J. W. Thompson, Economic and Social History oj the Middle Ages, Apple-
ton-Century, 1928, pp. 87-92.

28 Thompson, op. cit.f Chap. XXVI.

176 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

In the few towns the property was held chiefly by the masters of the
gilds. In the craft gilds, the shops and tools were usually privately owned
by individual gild masters, though journeymen frequently owned their
own tools. The control of medieval towns over town buildings, fortifica-
tions, and military enterprise resembled urban socialism. The most ex-
tensive control of property by medieval towns was manifested by organ-
izations of merchants — particularly the Hanseatic League, which included
various commercial cities in Germany and northern Europe and main-
tained a great merchant marine, trading stations, a navy, and an army.

As in ancient Greece, the idea of monetary property and property rights
made progress slowly. There was sharp limitation on all forms of specu-
lation. All interest was regarded as usury and was forbidden except in
the case of Jews, who, by special dispensation, acted as bankers and
moneylenders.

Though the Church praised poverty as a leading Christian virtue and
warned against absorption with earthly goods, it was actually the largest
single property holder in the Middle Ages. While it held its lands and
other property as "the steward of Christ," it maintained its property with
as great pride and tenacity as any secular owner. However, the Church
supported the policy, in theory at least, of using property for the public
good, and condemned as sinful most of the policies now universally fol-
lowed under capitalism to get profits and accumulate property. More-
over, the rise of the Franciscans and the mendicant friars in the later
Middle Ages revived once more the Christian eulogy of poverty.29

In short, the Middle Ages represented a reversion to a predominantly
communal economy and extensive limitations of private property. It
has been not inaccurately observed that in the Middle Ages the property
system rested more upon personal and legal relationships than it did upon
clear title to ownership. But, as medievalism wore on, the communal
aspect and relationship system tended to give way slowly before the
inroads of private enterprise.

Property in Early Modern Times After the Commercial Revolution.
With the rise of modern times we pass from the medieval system, where
property rested more upon personal and functional relationships than
upon absolute ownership, to a situation in which complete private prop-
erty in land, movables, and business accessories became the rule. And
the political and legal system gave nearly complete recognition and pro-
tection to these remarkable extensions of private property concepts and
practices, making it what some economic historians call the "proprietary
period" in the evolution of property.

It must be remembered that modern economic institutions did not come
with the same rapidity to all the countries of Europe. They appeared
first in England and the Low Countries. In some parts of Europe, espe-
cially eastern and central Europe, the feudal system, the manor, and the
gilds lingered, in differing degrees of consistency, for generations or cen-

. Gore, op. cit., Chaps. IV-V.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 177

turies. There the property relationships of the Middle Ages hung over
with slight change. Where the new economic setup was realized, thor-
oughgoing private ownership of land was established, whether in large
estates created by enclosing the scattered strips of the medieval manor,
or in the lesser holdings of the squires and small farmers. The com-
munal system of the medieval manor was wiped out and the serfs became
either peasant workers for wages or, less frequently, small proprietors.
In almost every case those who owned the land also owned the imple-
ments and tools necessary to cultivate it.

In the realm of industry, private ownership became nearly universal
in western Europe. The gild system was replaced by the putting-out
system, in which the merchant capitalist owned the raw materials and
the workers in their homes normally owned their tools. In commercial
activity, which required larger investment, joint-stock companies fre-
quently arose, and ownership was divided among the participants.

One of the most revolutionary changes in property at this time was
the rise of capitalism and a money economy, the final triumph of the
notion of property in money and the freedom to use it. The medieval
identification of interest with usury was wiped out. The use of money
to acquire more monetary property through lending, investment, and
speculation became generally approved.

These innovations constituted the essential elements of the new capi-
talism.80 Private property was deemed necessary, and it was thought
to be essential to accumulate it for further investment. Business had to
produce a surplus for further investment and expansion. The appear-
ance at this time of double-entry bookkeeping concentrated attention
upon private profits and the virtues of private property:

Ideas of profit-seeking and economic rationalism first became possible with the
invention of double-entry bookkeeping. Through this system can be grasped
but one thing — the increase in amount of values considered purely quantitatively.
Whoever becomes immersed in double-entry bookkeeping must forget all qualities
of goods, and services, abandon the limitations of the need-covering principle, and
be filled with the single idea of profit; he may not think of books and cargoes,
meal and cotton, but only of amounts of values, increasing or diminishing.81

Economic philosophy bestowed its blessings upon the new era of pri-
vate property. John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others
praised property as a supreme virtue and the chief incentive to human
effort. Sir William Blackstone observed that "nothing so generally
strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the
right of property." Property came to be regarded as an inherent natural
right of mankind and property itself was regarded as "inalienable, im-
mutable, and indefeasible." Even religion gave warm approval to the
new era of private property rights. As Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsoh,

80 Cf. Jerome Davis, Capitalism and Its Culture, Farrar & Rinehart, 1935.

81 Werner Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, Munich, 1921-27, Vol. II, pp. 119-
120.

178 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

R. H. Tawney, and others have pointed out, Protestant ethics thoroughly
backed up the concepts and practices of the new capitalistic system. But
the element of stewardship was not ignored.32 John Locke contended
that the chief purpose of government is to protect property, and legisla-
tors quickly took heed and made this abstract theory a practical reality.

This remarkable development and extension of private property gave
a new incentive to personal effort in economic life. Personal ownership
produced personal opportunity and responsibility for acquiring profits.
Property in this era was real, active, dynamic, and widely distributed.
In the twentieth century, property owners and their legal defenders ex-
ploited these facts of earlier centuries in order to defend quite a different
economic system, in which property and property rights had taken on
remarkably altered traits and attributes had become passive and para-
sitical. The beginnings of the change were to be found even in the
early period with the rise of joint-stock companies and the growth of stock
exchanges. Through these instruments, a new form of property arose.
It was not the ownership of a material thing but of a piece of paper
which stood for the thing, and constituted a claim upon the profits of
enterprise and speculation.

Property after the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution
stimulated the growth of capitalism and the power and scope of private
property. In England, peasants were thrown off their small holdings,
which they had occupied tenuously through customary copyholds, and
the land was concentrated in great estates through the enclosing of land
between 1760 and 1830. In France, the French Revolution brought about
the opposite results by breaking up great estates and increasing the
number of small peasant holdings. In English colonies in America much
of the land was formally owned by great proprietors who held by royal
grant, or by the Dutch patroons along the Hudson. But in the later
Colonial period, private ownership became more usual and a major social
result of the American Revolution was the wiping out of great estates, and
of entail and primogeniture. The private ownership of relatively small
farms became the rule. This process was encouraged by the settlement
of the West, and particularly by the famous Homestead Act of 1862.
The building of transcontinental railroads threw much land into the
hands of the railroad companies, but even most of this was later sold
off to homesteaders. Timber and mineral interests, however, acquired
vast tracts of the public domain, to the detriment of the country which
was not yet alive to the pressing need for conservation policies.

This trend, however, was reversed in the twentieth century and there
has been a marked decrease in outright farm ownership. The number
of mortgaged farms has increased notably. In 1890, the tenants made
up only 28 per cent of all farm occupants, while in 1930 they constituted
42 per cent. Tenancy is still on the gain in over forty states. Some of
these tenants, such as the southern sharecroppers, live in extremely pre-

C/. Gore, op. cit., Chap. VI.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 179

carious fashion. Inadequate conservation methods and foolish methods
of cultivation have led to the exhaustion of the land and forced migra-
tion of the owners, particularly in the western dust bowl region.

The first World War in Europe was followed by much agrarian reform,
particularly in Central Europe and the Balkans. Large estates were
broken up and given over to small holders. But in Russia, private own-
ership of land was either extinguished or subjected to extreme forms of
state control. The rise of fascism has been accompanied by a large
increase of state control over private property. If current tendencies
continue, independent private ownership of land in Europe seems likely
to be severely controlled or entirely obliterated.

The invention of machinery for production created the factory system.
Many of these factories were, at first, privately owned. Even when they
came to be owned by partnerships and joint-stock companies the owner-
ship of the factories was vested in those who operated them and received
the profits. Ownership was not yet separated from management and
control.

While property holding by the business classes became more impressive,
the Industrial Revolution and the factory system produced opposite re-
sults for the laboring masses. They no longer owned their own tools or
shops. They became what has been called "wage-slaves," rarely owning
even their own homes and becoming wholly dependent upon those who
controlled the factories:

First, there appears the important fact that the proletarian is a typical
representative of that kind of man who no longer is in relation (either internal
or external) to Nature. The proletarian does not realise the meaning of the
movement of the clouds in the sky; he no longer understands the voice of the
storm. ... He has no fatherland, rather he has no home in which he takes
root. Can he feel at home in the dreary main streets, four stories high? He
changes his dwelling often either because he dislikes his landlord or because he
changes his place of work. As he moves from room to room, so he goes from
city to city, from land to land, wherever opportunity (i.e., capitalism) calls.
Homeless, restless, he moves over the earth; he loses the sense of local colour; his
home is the world. He has lost the call of Nature, and he has assimilated mate-
rialism. It is a phenomenon of today that the great mass of the population has
nothing to call its own. In earlier times the poorest had a piece of land, a
cottage, a few animals to call his own; a trifle on which, however, he could set
his whole heart. Today a handcart carries all his possessions when a proletarian
moves. A few old scraps are all by which his individual existence is to be
known. ... All community feeling is destroyed by the iron foot of capitalism.
The village life is gone; the proletarian has no social home; the separate family
disappears.33

The need for greater expenditures, with the development of the factory
system, increased production and trade, and stimulated the growth of
capitalism. Larger fortunes arose. Banking institutions became more
extensive and powerful, to provide credit for the new business. Indus-

33 Werner Sombart, Das Proletariat, cited in Milton Briggs and Percy Jordan,
Economic History of England, 4th ed., University Tutorial Press, Ltd., 1914, p. 182.

180 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

trial expansion became the rule. Property was accumulated, in part
to reinvest, to extend productive plants and to increase profits. But
throughout this era, preeminently the nineteenth century, management
and control remained in the hands of owners. A considerable group, to
be sure, derived their income from investment in securities and thus be-
came what we know as "absentee owners/' but they were the exceptions
rather than the rule until near the close of the nineteenth century.
With the growth of larger property interests there was ever greater
effort upon the part of owners to secure more legal protection of their
right of ownership and their freedom of enterprise.84

Property under Finance Capitalism. Few persons other than tech-
nical students of economic history and corporation finance realize that
the twentieth century has produced one of the greatest revolutions in
the whole history of property, especially in the United States. With the
concentration of industry and growth in the size of plants, legal owner-
ship in large corporations has been vested chiefly in a large number of
security holders. But these owners do not control the policies of the
corporations or actively manage the operation of the factories. They
are what we call absentee owners, meaning by this that they have no
personal contact with either the corporate offices or the plants which turn
out goods and services. Their ownership is both passive and relatively
impotent. Only a few very rich families, like the Fords, the Mellons, and
the DuPonts have enough personal wealth to own and operate their giant
concerns.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the industrialist owned and
operated his factories and machines. He controlled the policies of
production and sales, and actively managed the operation of his plant.
Ownership, control, and management were unified. Those who control
business enterprise today are the officers and directors of the giant cor-
porations. But they own relatively few of the securities of such corpo-
rations, rarely as much as 10 per cent and usually less than 5 per cent.
They rarely take any part in the actual management of factories and
business enterprises, but hand it over to salaried experts, often trained
in schools of business administration. These experts run the plant in
accordance with policies laid down by the few men — the official clique —
who have gained control of the corporate enterprise through juggling
securities.

All this constitutes a sweeping revolution in the former system of uni-
fied ownership, control and management of business. Owners cannot
control the use of their property and have only a precarious legal claim
on some possible return from the use of their property by others.35
Those who control the use of property do not own what they use and
control but can use it as they wish, short of the most overt and palpable
fraud. They are frequently able to escape detection even when guilty

84 See Gore, op. cit., Chap. VIII.

85 Cf. Harry Scherman, The Promises Men Live By, Random House, 1938.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 181

of gigantic swindles. Property, therefore, is no longer active and
dynamic, as it was in early modern times. It is now mainly passive in
great business enterprises:

The characteristic fact, which differentiates most modern property from that
of the pre-industrial age, and which turns against it the very reasoning by which
formerly it was supported, is that in modern economic conditions ownership is
not active, but passive, that to most of those who own property today it is not
a means of work but an instrument for the acquisition of gain or the exercise of
power, and that there is no guarantee that gain bears any relation to service, or
power to responsibility. For property which can be regarded as a condition of
the performance of function, like the tools of the craftsman, or the holding of the
peasant, or the personal possessions which contribute to a life of health and
efficiency, forms an insignificant proportion, as far as its value is concerned, of
the property rights existing at present. In modern industrial societies the great
mass of property consists, as the annual review of wealth passing at death re-
veals, neither of personal acquisitions such as household furniture, nor of the
owner's stock-in-trade, but of rights of various kinds, such as royalties, ground-
rents, and, above all, of course, shares in industrial undertakings which yield an
income irrespective of any personal service rendered by their owners. Owner-
ship and use are normally divorced. The greater part of modern property has
been attenuated to a pecuniary lien or bond on the product of industry which
carries with it a right to payment, but which is normally valued precisely be-
cause it relieves the owner from any obligation to perform a positive or construcr
tive function.36

Control is now the active and dynamic development in business enter-
prise, not ownership or property. The owners, in most cases, do not
even know how their property is being used. Though the great corpora-
tions give out annual reports, they are either inadequate, very technical,
or both. As Alden Winthrop has made clear, not one stockholder out of
a hundred can read and understand a corporation report, even if the
report happens to be comprehensive and accurate. Owners can only
trust to their luck and hope to escape from the worst forms of fraud and
mismanagement.

Since those who do control business enterprise own only a negligible
part of the enterprise, they cannot expect any large income from the
direct and legitimate profits paid out in dividends. They must seek
their reward primarily in large salaries and bonuses at the expense of the
owners, or in speculative profits from internal manipulations, which are
even more disastrous to the owners than lavish salaries and bonuses. We
have described in Chapter VI how such speculative frauds and misman-
agement have already sent more than half of the great business enter-
prises of our country into bankruptcy and reorganization. When this
bankruptcy takes place, those in control — officials and directors — usually
take over the reorganized enterprise and the original owners are left more
or less propertyless, so far as the enterprise in question is concerned.87
This tremendous revolution in the character and use of property, as a

86 R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, Harcourt Brace, 1920, pp. 61-62.
37 Cf. Max Lowenthal, The Investor Pays, Knopf, 1933.

182 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

phase of the corporate revolution and the separation of ownership from
control, has been competently summarized by A. A. Berle and Gardiner
Means:

Corporations have ceased to be merely legal devices through which the private
business transactions of individuals may be carried on. Though still much used
for this purpose, the corporate form has acquired a larger significance. The
corporation has, in fact, become both a method of property tenure and a means
of organizing economic life. Grown to tremendous proportions, there may be
said to have evolved a "coq:>orate system" — as there was once a feudal system —
which has attracted to itself a combination of attributes and powers, and has
attained a degree of prominence entitling it to be dealt with as a major social
institution. . . .

In its new aspect the corporation is a means whereby the wealth of innumer-
able individuals has been concentrated into huge aggregates and whereby control
over this wealth has been surrendered to a unified direction. The power attend-
ant upon such concentration has brought forth princes of industry, whose
position in the community is yet to be defined. The surrender of control over
their wealth by investors has effectively broken the old property relationships
and has raised the problem of defining these relationships anew. The direction
of industry by persons other than those who have ventured their wealth has
raised the question of the motive force back of such direction and the effective
distribution of the returns from business enterprise.

Outwardly the change is simple enough. Men are less likely to own the
physical instruments of production. They are more likely to own pieces of
paper, loosely known as stocks, bonds, and other securities, which have become
mobile through the machinery of the public markets. Beneath this, however,
lies a more fundamental shift. Physical control over the instruments of produc-
tion has been surrendered in ever growing degree to centralized groups who
manage property in bulk, supposedly, but by no means necessarily, for the
benefit of the security holders. Power over industrial property has been cut off
from the beneficial ownership of this property — or, in less technical language,
from the legal right to enjoy its fruits. Control of physical assets has passed
from the individual owner to those who direct the quasi-public institutions, while
the owner retains an interest in their product and increase. We see, in fact, the
surrender and regrouping of the incidence of ownership, which formerly bracketed
full power of manual disposition with complete right to enjoy the use, the fruits,
and the proceeds of physical assets. There has resulted the dissolution of the
old atom of ownership into its component parts, control and beneficial ownership.

The dissolution of the atom of property destroys the very foundation on
which the economic order of the past three centuries has rested. Private enter-
prise, which has molded economic life since the close of the middle ages, has been
rooted in the institution of private property. . . .

In the quasi-public corporation, such an assumption no longer holds. As we
have seen, it is no longer the individual himself who uses his wealth. Those in
control of that wealth, and therefore in a position to secure industrial efficiency
and produce profits, are no longer, as owners, entitled to the bulk of such profits.
Those who control the destinies of the typical modern corporation own so
insignificant a fraction of the company's stock that the returns from running
the corporation profitably accrue to them in only a very minor degree. The
stockholders, on the other hand, to whom the profits of the corporation go,
cannot be motivated by those profits to a more efficient use of the property, since
they have surrendered all disposition of it to those in control of the enterprise.
The explosion of the atom of property destroys the basis of the old assumption
that the quest for profits will spur the owner of industrial property to its
effective use. It consequently challenges the fundamental economic principle
of individual initiative in industrial enterprise. It raises for reexamination the

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 183

question of the motive force back of industry, and the ends for which the modern
corporation can be or will be run.38

The sweeping transformation in the property system has not only
separated ownership from control and created a system of passive and
helpless absentee ownership, but it has also made property holding and
claims exceedingly complex, as compared with the days when property
consisted mainly of the direct ownership and use of lands, weapons, or
tools. Professor Tawney lists some of the outstanding types of property
today, running from the direct and personal to the most abstruse legal
claims:

1. Property in payments made for personal services.

2. Property in personal possessions necessary to health and comfort.

3. Property in land and tools used by their owners.

4. Property in copyright and patent rights owned by authors and inventors.

5. Property in pure interest, including much agricultural rent.

6. Property in profits of luck and good fortune: "quasi-rents."

7. Property in monopoly profits.

8. Property in urban ground rents.

9. Property in royalties.39

Most of the changes in property concepts and usages in recent years
have borne some definite relationship to corporate practices and inter-
ests. Outstanding among such changes has been the enormous, even
absurd, extension of the legal concept of property and property rights.
At the very time when actual property rights are being blurred almost out
of existence by corporation finance, and when property itself is becoming
progressively more insecure, a vast field of vested interests, claims, and
relationships, which cannot in any literal sense be regarded as property,
have been brought under the legal cloak of property, and glorified and
protected. Due to the ingenuity of corporation lawyers, who serve
those controlling contemporary business enterprise, the concept of prop-
erty has been extended until it has lost all realism.

Any vested private interest which was threatened by progressive legis-
lation for the public welfare was christened "property" by the legal bat-
talions of corporation finance and the courts have usually upheld this
legal casuistry.40 As Professor Hamilton has sagely observed, the courts
did not so much literally protect property; they gave the name "property"
to everything they protected.41 This innovation was brought about in
the United States primarily as the result of the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Federal Constitution, originally framed and adopted to protect the
civil rights of the Negroes in the South. It stated, among other things,
that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without
due process of law. About fifteen years later, the lawyers induced the
courts to regard a corporation as a person. Then they used the vague

38 The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Macmillan, 1932, pp. 1, 2, 7-9.
89 Tawney, op. cit.. pp. 63-64.

40 Cf. T. W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism, Yale University Press, 1937.

41 Hamilton, loc. cit., p. 536.

184 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

"due process of law" concept as the means of declaring unconstitutional
almost any attack upon vested economic interests, even notorious offenses
against the public weal. Policies and acts which powerful economic inter-
est opposed were declared contrary to due process of law and were thus
set aside by the courts as unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court of the United States admitted to legal protection
under the concept of property and property rights such matters as
monopoly and the restraint of trade, the ability to charge such railroad
rates as the railroads saw fit, the right to manufacture shoddy material
and to use short weights in making sales, the right to escape the taxation
of income, inheritances, and stock dividends, the right to maintain any
working conditions that businessmen saw fit to impose upon their em-
ployees, the right to outlaw union labor, and the right of business prac-
tices to evade governmental control. The fact that some of these "rights"
were later denied does not affect the fact that they were defended as prop-
erty rights by lawyers and were so sustained for many years by the
supreme law of the United States. Indeed, most of these stood as law
until President Roosevelt's attack upon the Supreme Court in 1937.42
The relation of the American constitution to the protection of property
and the degree to which the sanctity of property has developed under
judicial protection is described by Arthur W. Calhoun:

The United States Constitution was made by a convention of property interests
for the express purpose of preventing democracy and with the positive aim of
keeping the propertyless masses in subjection. The Constitution was designed
as a frame-work of government to operate for the purpose of carrying out a
supreme principle antecedent to the Constitution and possessing untouchable
sanctity, namely the sacredness of private property, which no government was
entitled to infringe.

One may read the Constitution with considerable care and not detect its
capitalistic nature unless he is primed for the discovery. Unless one knows all
about the making of the document and the "higher law" that it ordained to
carry out, he may still cherish fatal illusions about "the charter of our liberties."
The best corrective of such fallacies is the behavior of the United States Supreme
Court specifically in its refusal to take jurisdiction for the protection of life and
personal property of an ordinary sort, whereas it will comb to the limit any case
in which a state is charged with confiscation of capitalist property.

If Sacco and Vanzetti had been proprietors of a little electric plant in a small
Massachusetts town, the United States Supreme Court would have been glad
to see that justice was done them in a rate case by the state courts. So sacred
is capitalist property. But no federal judge could be found to guarantee their
rights to life and liberty against the fatuous and bungling travesty on justice
perpetrated by the Massachusetts courts. The Constitution professes to give
the same protection to life and liberty that it does to property, but the profession
amounts to virtually nothing in any crucial case.

All this is entirely natural for inevitably the central purpose of government
must be to safeguard the economic system that prevails at the given time. Any
other procedure would be suicidal. Consequently those that support the capi-
talist system have no ground for objecting when government lends itself as a
tool to the capitalist interests.43

42 C). L. B. Boudin, Government by Judiciary, 2 Vols., Godwin, 1932, Vol. II.

43 A. W. Calhoun, The Social Universe, Vanguard, 1932, pp. 45-47.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 185

During the early New Deal days the Court upheld, as property rights,
freedom from the restrictions of the National Industry Recovery Act and
the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It upheld the immunity of the soft
coal industry from adequate government control and set aside the New
York State minimum wage act. The foregoing are only some of the
more important extensions of the property concept sanctioned by the
Supreme Court. They are only a fraction of the interests and policies
which vested interests and lawyers maintained to be legitimate categories
of property. The excesses and abuses contained therein were largely
responsible for the revolt against the Supreme Court. Its reconstruction
by President Roosevelt seems likely to bring about a marked restriction
of further legalistic adventures in this field.

We now seem on the eve of a new era in economic life which tnay bring
about startling changes in property rights and usages. In Soviet Russia,
state socialism was thoroughly established and with it came the end of
the private ownership of the means of production and distribution. In
so-called "Middle-Way" countries, like Sweden, and in Fascist states,
differing degrees of state capitalism were instituted. This innovation
imposed serious restrictions upon many property rights and substituted
actual government ownership of such things as public utilities and natural
resources. Under the pressure of war, the movement towards government
control and government ownership has been rapid even in the democracies.
It would be rash to make precise predictions about the future of property,
but one would be safe in suggesting that the days of unrestricted or even
predominant private property are numbered. It is doubtful if they will
survive the present generation.

The Inheritance of Property

Since we have relative freedom in the transmission of property in the
United States, we usually assume that this situation prevails everywhere
among civilized peoples. Such is not the case. Only in England and
the United States do we find relatively complete freedom in the disposi-
tion of property through inheritance. Group and family claims on the
estate are widely recognized elsewhere because of the so-called right of
legitim, or the legally enforceable claim of widows and children to some
part of the estate of the deceased.

Another consideration is that today the right of inheritance has no
great personal significance to the mass of mankind, whatever its signif-
icance for our economic system as a whole. Only a very small fraction
of the populace can accumulate enough property so that it may be
transmitted as large fortunes. For example, in England and Wales just
before the first World War only 15 per cent of all persons possessing any
personal income had property valued at more than $500 and only 7
per cent possessed more than $2,500 in property. In Prussia, in 1908,
only about 14 per cent of the population had property valued at more
than $1,200.

186 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

In primitive society, the inheritance of private property was relatively
unimportant. Most of the land was owned communally or by family
groups. Therefore, inheritance was mainly, though not wholly, limited
to the transmission of movable objects and chattels. However, primitive
magic and religion imposed limitations on the transmission of even these
privately owned objects. Since possession and use were believed to
confer the magic potency — the mana — of the possessor, it was often
deemed dangerous for any survivor to claim and use the personal property
of a deceased person. As the result of this notion, weapons, tools, and
other private possessions were often either buried with the deceased or
burned at his death.

Though primitive uses in respect to inheritance may have been rela-
tively unimportant in an economic sense, they were numerous and com-
plicated.44 As a general rule, those things useful to men were transmitted
to male relatives and those things most serviceable to females to the
female survivors. Anthropologists believe that this custom was one
reason why women were so frequently excluded from inheriting property
belonging to their husbands or fathers.

The relatives favored in the inheritance of property were decided by
the particular relationship system prevailing, which was usually com-
plicated* Collateral inheritance was common. Under this system,
property went to the surviving brothers of the deceased before it could be
transmitted to his sons. Primogeniture, or inheritance of the whole
property by the eldest son, sometimes existed, but it was relatively rare
in primitive society. Indeed, the opposite system at times prevailed.
Then the older sons were compelled to leave the family home. The
youngest son stayed at home and inherited the property of his father.

In ancient Egypt, it was the usual thing to permit nobles to transmit
their lands and goods with the consent of the Pharaoh. The tools and
implements used in the crafts and trades were handed on from father to
sons within the family. But the right of inheritance was always strictly
limited by the power of the monarch:

, It was in families that peasants, craftsmen, and officials worked for the King.
Children succeeded their fathers in fields, workshops, and offices. But we should
note that this heredity was always uncertain, not giving complete ownership and
in no way impairing the principle of the King's eminent ownership of lands and
employments. In consequence, there were no social castes in ancient Egypt, and
a man could always change his calling, at his wish or by desire of the King.45

Much the same situation with respect to inheritance prevailed in
Mesopotamia. The right of inheritance was frequently not equal among
all the heirs. For example, in Assyria the eldest son was often allowed
to take two thirds of the estate, one third of which he personally selected,
the other third being chosen by lot.46

44Lowie, op. cit., pp. 243 ff.
45 Moret, op. cit., p. 273.
*6Delaporte, op. cit., p. 295.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 187

In Athenian society the right to transmit property was definitely limited
by the ties and claims of kindred. No bequests could be made outside of
the clan without its consent and a special dispensation. The property of
a man went directly to his sons. No legitimate son could be disinherited.
If a dying man had no son he might adopt one, and he usually imposed
the condition that this adopted son marry one of his daughters, if there
were any. The dying man could then will his property to this adopted
son.

In Sparta the civic land held by the Spartans was equally divided
among the families and was transmitted undivided to the children. In-
heritance was, thus, .closely controlled by the group. The property of
the Perioeci could be more freely transmitted by wills and bequests, but
even here there were restrictions.

In early Rome, the inheritance of property was controlled by family
relationships. All the children, both male and female, had equal rights,
and a grandchild had the rights of a child if his father was dead. Since
the early Roman land holdings were small, they were rarely divided up
among the heirs but all continued to use the property as beneficiaries in
common. Women were not allowed to make a will in early days but
were later freed from this disability. It was a disgrace to leave an
insolvent estate. In such cases the testator usually willed his property
to a slave, on whom the disgrace might fall. The claims of the kin were
protected even in later Roman law. The famous law Papia Poppaea of
9 A.D. prevented distant kinsmen from inheriting the complete estate of
a deceased relative. Further, married people without children were
restricted in the amount which they could will to each other. There were
many subtleties and technicalities in the Roman law of inheritance into
which we need not go here.47 The above-mentioned concept of the
legitim was basic in Roman inheritance. It has persisted in Romance
countries, where the legal system has been modeled on that of Rome, thus
limiting the freedom of inheritance in those countries.

In early German law a father's property was divided equally among
his sons. This practice even restricted somewhat the practice of primo-
geniture in Germany during the feudal period, though primogeniture was
common there. In most of western Europe inheritance by primogeniture
prevailed among the nobility and knights. For both military and eco-
nomic reasons it was desirable to keep estates intact. The serfs on the
manor had no power of free transmission of property. They did not own
any land, and their tools and cattle were communally controlled and
handed on through the family. The gildsmen in the towns could transmit
their property to their heirs, but gild laws and usages restricted complete
independence in testamentary disposition of property.

Even in Britain and the United States there are restrictions likely to
be enforced by law. Male descendants have an advantage over females

47 See a brief summary in J. E. Sandys, A Companion to Latin Studies f Cambridge
University Press, 1921, pp. 311-316.

188 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

in their claims and, if a man disinherits any or all of his legitimate chil-
dren, there is a reasonable prospect that legal action will succeed in
destroying or modifying the will of the deceased. When there is no
legitimate heir the general rule of inheritance is that the closest male
relative shall receive the property.

In Soviet Russia, the inheritance of property was at first wiped out
entirely. Later on, relative freedom of inheritance was restored. But
since most private property has been extinguished in Soviet Russia, about
all that can be transmitted are personal possessions. In Fascist states,
inheritance has not only been curtailed but in some cases nullified through
heavy inheritance taxes and confiscation. Under a system of state so-
cialism or state capitalism the inheritance of property is therefore rela-
tively as unimportant as it was in primitive society.

Since inheritance today is a major cause of the existence and perpetua-
tion of great inequalities of wealth, the ethics of inheritance have been
warmly debated. Those who support freedom of inheritance argue that
it is an incentive to economic effort, that it alone makes possible an
adequate accumulation of capital for re-investment, and that it promotes
great bequests to culture and charity.

Against this is the argument that the rich seek to acquire for their own
sake rather than for their children. Many hang on to their estates until
their death in spite of the penalty of high inheritance taxes. It is stated
that too much capital is accumulated and invested. The unequal dis-
tribution of wealth makes it impossible for the masses to buy what is al-
ready turned out by the existing capital plant. Finally, it has been shown
that the bequests for charity and cultural purposes by the wealthy are
relatively insignificant. In France, on the eve of the first World War,
only one per cent of great fortunes went for such purposes. While the
percentage is a little higher in England and the United States, it is rela-
tively negligible, as Abraham Epstein, E. C. Lindeman, and Horace Coon
have amply shown.

Professor Lindeman's book, Wealth and Culture, is an important study
of the social significance of bequests from the estates of the wealthy. It
is an elaborate survey of the relation between great fortunes and humani-
tarian effort. The product of several years of careful study, it is an
impressive statistical analysis of the problem. Mr. Lindeman here pre-
sents evidence as to the enormous concentration of property and income in
the United States, such as the fact that one per cent of the people own
59 per cent of the total wealth of the country, and 13 per cent own
90 per cent of the total wealth, and 75 per cent own practically nothing.
In the matter of income, there is also a large concentration in the hands
of a fortunate few. For example, the 1.7 per cent of the population
having incomes of over $5,000 a year receive 14.8 per cent of the total
money income.

Do those who are fortunate with respect to wealth and income hand
back most of it for the benefit of humanity? Mr. Lindeman finds that
there is no such general tendency, as is usually taken for granted, for

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 189

the wealthy to return any considerable part of their income to be put at
the service of mankind:

It seems entirely clear that persons who possess large estates do not, at death,
redistribute any sizeable portion of their wealth to society. They pass their
wealth on, so far as is possible, to a small circle of relatives and friends. Only
six per cent of the wealthy distribute their estates among agencies and institutions.
Moreover, the sum which they thus distribute amounts to only six per cent of
the total wealth bequeathed.

And, what is even of greater significance, perhaps, is the fact that the bulk of
wealth thus distributed flows into the treasuries of churches, hospitals, and con-
ventional charities. In short, the cultural importance of redistributed personal
wealth is slight. This analysis of probated wills and appraised estates reveals
that Americans on the whole regard their wealth as personal possessions to be
disposed of according to individual interest or fancy.48

From the funds at the disposal of the foundations and community
trusts in the United States there is contributed only some five to ten
per cent of the total of our philanthropic budget. Most of their appro-
priations here have gone for the furtherance of projects devoted to
education, health, and social welfare. Ninety per cent of all their ex-
penditures from 1920 to 1930 went for such purposes.

Coon has gone even further and shown that many gifts for charitable
and cultural purposes, especially in the form of great endowments, have
been consciously bestowed mainly to protect property from state inter-
ference. By linking up these endowments with science, medicine, engi-
neering, and art, it is possible for those who defend vested wealth to
allege that any attack upon property and profits means a blow at all
human culture. Social reforms can thus be blocked or discredited by
propaganda. In other words, many, if not most, bequests are consciously
given as a mode of insurance against a greater degree of state restriction
of economic freedom and property rights.49

Another point to be emphasized is that the higher the taxes that are
imposed upon great fortunes, especially upon their transmission, the
greater the probability that gifts will be made for charitable and cultural
purposes before decease.

The Social Justification of Property and
Property Rights

In considering the arguments in support of the institution of private
property it should be kept clearly in mind that there is no such thing as
a natural or inherent right of property which, like the law of gravitation,
antedates the appearance of man on the planet. Property, especially
private property, is purely a social institution, which made its appearance
relatively late in the experience of mankind. If property is to be justified
and vindicated, this can only be done by showing that the contributions

48 Lindeman, op. cit., Harcourt, Brace, 1935, p. 50.

49 Horace Coon. Money to Burn, Longmans, Green, 1939.

190 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

of private property to human well-being and social progress outweigh
the evil effects of private property. This institution must stand on its
own merits. Like all other social institutions, it must be judged by its
social contributions and liabilities.50

The most elementary argument for private property is that it is neces-
sary to provide for the bare needs of human subsistence. But, to assure
mere subsistence, private property has not been required. Communally
held property has assured both subsistence and a considerable surplus over
the bare needs of living. Certain schools of radical thought even contend
that state ownership would bring about a far higher standard of living
than private property has ever produced. We do not assume here to con-
firm or refute any such assertion. All we need do is to make it clear that
private property is not essential to life, even in well developed societies.
The vital necessity is to have the materials essential to life available for
use by groups and individuals. Private property has often performed this
function, but it is by no means indispensable in this service. Whatever
can assure effective use of lands, tools, and goods will suffice.

Though private property may not be necessary to assure mere liveli-
hood it may supply the most dynamic human initiative and stimulate
the highest degree of human efficiency. This, indeed, is the most usual
argument in behalf of private property. Volumes have been spoken and
written on "the magic touch of private property" in awakening human
effort. One of the most impressive, Carl Snyder's Capitalism the Creator,
appeared in 1940. There is considerable validity to this argument under
conditions in which the mode of holding and using property bears a direct
relationship to private gain. It should be made clear, however, that
human effort can be stimulated by other motives than pecuniary greed.
The normal man wishes to rate well according to the standards and
judgments which prevail in his society. When these standards and judg-
ments are primarily related to property and money, then private property
may, indeed, constitute a great impulse to effort. But, with a shift of
such standards in society, monetary gain and status would have less
potency. History supports this contention through such examples as
medieval monasticism, in which the ideal of poverty and the repudiation
of private property was a major social value and stimulus to conduct.
Social pressures may do quite as much as private property in stimulating
effort and initiative. This is proved by the effect of state supervision of
work in Periclcan Athens, and the power of gild ideals in stimulating
pride in workmanship during the Middle Ages. In other words, indus-
trial initiative can be of a social as well as a personal origin.

The best illustration of the impulse afforded to personal efficiency and
industrial effort by private property is drawn from conditions in early
modern times, say from 1650 to 1800. Then, both land and tools were
owned by private individuals, upon whose efforts depended the possi-

o Cj. Gore, op. tit., Chaps. II-III, VII.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 191

bility not only of making additional profits and extending property
holdings but even of retaining the property in hand:

When property in land and what simple capital existed were generally diffused
among all classes of society, when, in most parts of England, the typical workman
was not a laborer but a peasant or small master, who could point to the strips
which he had plowed or the cloth he had woven, when the greater part of the
wealth passing at death consisted of land, household furniture and a stock in
trade which was hardly distinguishable from it, the moral justification of the title
to property was self-evident. It was obviously, what theorists said, that it was,
and plain men knew it to be, the labor spent in producing, acquiring and
administering it.

Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its health
and efficiency, and indeed, of its continued existence. To protect it was to main-
tain the organization through which public necessities were supplied. If, as in
Tudor England, the peasant was evicted from his holding to make room for
sheep, or crushed, as in eighteenth century France, by arbitrary taxation and
seignurial dues, land went out of cultivation and the whole community was short
of food. If the tools of the carpenter or smith were seized, plows were not re-
paired or horses shod. Hence, before the rise of a commercial civilization, it
was the mark of statesmanship, alike in the England of the Tudors and in the
France of Henry IV, to cherish the small property-owner even to the point of
offending the great. ...

They found the meaning of property in the public purposes to which it con-
tributed, whether they were the production of food, as among the peasantry, or
the management of public affairs, as among the gentry, and hesitated neither to
maintain those kinds of property which met these obligations nor to repress
those uses of it which appeared likely to conflict with them. Property was to be
an aid to creative work, not an alternative to it. The patentee was secured
protection for his own brain, but the monopolist who grew fat on the industry of
others was to be put down. The law of the village bound the peasant to use his
land, not as he himself might find most profitable, but to grow the corn the
village needed.51

However, these conditions no longer prevail in most civilized states.
Hence arguments in behalf of property drawn from conditions of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries possess little or no validity in the
second third of the twentieth century.

In the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution, productive effort and
industrial expansion were stimulated by private property. When a man
owned and operated his own factory he had an immediate incentive to
industrial activity. The property motive also encouraged saving and
further investment in plant expansion because, with an extension of the
factory facilities, there was every reason to expect greater production
and profits. Nevertheless, we cannot attribute the great industrial de-
velopment of Europe and the United States between 1750 and 1900 solely
to the energy and efforts of businessmen, impelled by the profit and
property motives. As Professor F. W. Taussig pointed out in his im-
portant book on Investors and Moneymakers, we owe this remarkable
industrial expansion quite as much to scientists, engineers, and other
inventors. And these scientists and technicians were not dominated

51 Tawney, op. dt.t pp. 57, 59-60.

192 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

primarily by pecuniary impulses and the desire to accumulate property.
Many of them died penniless.

There is little doubt, then, that the acquisition and holding of property
were once of great aid in accumulating capital to promote industrial ex-
pansion. Until recent times, property may be regarded as having served
a useful service in this regard. But in late years the results of property
accumulation have been mainly anti-social and disastrous. There has
been a tendency to concentrate wealth and to overinvest in plant expan-
sion at the expense of wages and salaries. As a result, businessmen have
been able to sell only a fraction of what they can produce. This under-
consumption, growing out of inadequate purchasing power, is an out-
standing reason for the decline of the capitalistic system. In other
words, excessive savings, overinvestment in plant expansion, and notori-
ous concentration of wealth are paralyzing rather than stimulating capi-
talistic industry and business.

Under the system of absentee ownership, the possession of private
property docs not stimulate productive effort but, rather, indolence and
passivity. Property, in any large amount, is valuable today primarily
for the social prestige and display which it affords. And one of the major
ways in which this prestige and display may be manifested is through
unusual and conspicuous waste. It is not unfair, then, to maintain that
a great deal of property today promotes idleness and waste rather than
any effort whatever at productive efficiency. This important considera-
tion has been summarized with incomparable force and irony by Thorstein
Veblen in his famous book of The Theory of the Leisure Class:

So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem,
therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-
respect. In any community where goods are held in scveralty it is necessary, in
order to insure his own peace of mind, that an individual possess as large a
portion of goods as others with whom he is accustomed to class himself; and it
is extremely gratifying to possess something more than others. But as fast as a
person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the resulting new
standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably
greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any case is
constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure for a
fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new standard of suffi-
ciency and a new pecuniary classification of one's self as compared with one's
neighbours. . . .

In order to gain and hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess
wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is
awarded only on evidence. And not only does the evidence of wealth serve to
impress one's importance on others and to keep their sense of his importance
alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's
self-complacency. ...

Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act, but it
presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence on property as
the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious during the early stages
of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention from labour is the conventional evi-
dence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and
this insistence on the merit oriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous in-
sistence on leisure. . . .

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 193

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure . . . not only consumes of the staff
of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but
his consumption also undergoes a specialization as regards the quality of the
goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics,
shelter, services, ornaments . . . amulets, and idols or divinities. . . .

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the
gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided
effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method.
The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the
giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. . . .

From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consump-
tion, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies
in the element of waste that is common to both. In the one case it is a waste
of time and effort; in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of
demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted
as equivalents.52

Property holding and property motives in our day are, thus, likely to
lead to the exploitation of society and indifference to public interest:

If, therefore, under the modern conditions which have concentrated any substan-
tial share of property in the hands of a small minority of the population, the world
is to be governed for the advantages of those who own, it is only incidentally and
by accident that the results will be agreeable to those who work. In practice
there is a constant collision between them. Turned into another channel, half the
wealth distributed in dividends to functionless shareholders, could secure every
child a good education up to 18, could re-endow English Universities, and (since
more efficient production is important) could equip English industries for more
efficient production. Half the ingenuity now applied to the protection of property
could have made most industrial diseases as rare as smallpox, and most English
Cities into places of health and beauty. What stands in the way is the doctrine
that the rights of property are absolute, irrespective of any social function which
its owners may perform. So the laws which are most stringently enforced are still
the laws which protect property, though the protection of property is no longer
likely to be equivalent to the protection of work, and the interests which govern
industry and predominate in public affairs are proprietary interests. A mill-owner
may poison or mangle a generation of operatives ; but his brother magistrates will
let him off with a caution or a nominal fine to poison and mangle the next. For he
is an owner of property. A landowner may draw rents from slums in which
young children die at the rate of 200 per 1000; but he will be none the less
welcome in polite society. For property has no obligation and therefore can do
no wrong. Urban land may be held from the market on the outskirts of cities
in which human beings are living three to a room, and rural land may be used
for sport when villagers are leaving it to overcrowd them still more. No public
authority intervenes, for both are property. To those who believe that institu-
tions which repudiate all moral significance must sooner or later collapse, a
society which confuses the protection of property with the preservation of its
functionless perversions will appear as precarious as that which has left the
memorials of its tasteless frivolity and more tasteless ostentation in the gardens
of Versailles.53

It is, thus, very evident that there is no important incentive to effort in
passive or functionless property, as it now exists under a system of

52 From The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen. Copyright 1899,
1912. By permission of The Viking Press, Inc., New York. Pp. 31, 36-37, 41, 73, 75, 85.
fi8 Tawney, op. cit., pp. 79-81.

194 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

absentee ownership. Indeed, the situation today is one in which the
dominion of functionless property threatens the existence of the whole
property system and, with it, capitalistic society:

Indeed, functionless property is the greatest enemy of legitimate property it-
self. It is the parasite which kills the organism that produced it. Bad money
drives out good, and, as the history of the last two hundred years shows, when
property for acquisition or power and property for service or for use jostle each
other freely in the market, without restrictions such as some legal systems have
imposed on alienation and inheritance, the latter tends normally to be absorbed
by the former, because it has less resisting power. Thus functionless property
grows, and as it grows it undermines the creative energy which produced property
and which in earlier ages it protected. It cannot unite men, for what united
them is the bond of service to a common purpose, and that bond it repudiates,
whence its very essence is the maintenance of rights irrespective of service. It
cannot create; it can only spend, so that the number of scientists, inventors,
artists, or men of letters who have sprung in the course of the last century from
hereditary riches can be numbered on one hand. It values neither culture nor
beauty, but only the power which belongs to wealth and the ostentation which is
the symbol of it.54

As J. A. Hobson and others have suggested, there are many incentives
other than property which may impel man to efficient and productive
effort. Such are the pride of workmanship, community spirit, interest
in the public weal, and striving for cultural and professional superiority.
The competitive spirit can be stimulated even in economic production by
other than profit and property motives. This has been demonstrated by
the Stakhanov system in Soviet Russia, where prizes and prestige have
been bestowed upon those who create outstanding records for productive
efficiency. Self-expression, prestige, and superiority are powerful mo-
tives among mankind. Property is a strong stimulus only when social
prestige and superiority rests primarily upon wealth. When other types
of achievement confer comparable or greater prestige, they immediately
become more powerful than property in stimulating human effort.

In conclusion, while private property has constituted a powerful im-
pulse to initiative and efficiency in the past, and especially in early
modern times, much of present-day property encourages industrial
'passivity and personal sloth, rather than efficient productive effort. As
L. T. Hobhouse puts it, modern economic conditions have all but abolished
property for use and have substituted property for power.55 And a
great deal of property is accumulated, held, and utilized by methods
which hamper production and undermine the health of the capitalistic
system.

In any event, it is high time to seek new incentives for mankind.
Rightly or wrongly, whether we approve or regret the change, it seems
that we are headed towards an era in which private property will be
greatly reduced, if not entirely obliterated, except for purely personal
possessions. If we pass into an age in which there is little private

c* Ibid., pp. 81-82.

05 Gore, op. cit., p. 23.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 195

property and we have no other incentives for human effort, the state of
mankind will be unfortunate indeed.

From the ethical and psychological point of view, it has been argued
that private property is desirable for its influence upon the human per-
sonality— that property rounds out the personality, gives a sense of
responsibility, and helps to provide a salutary discipline over ideas and
conduct. There is some element of truth in this contention.56 But it is
also true, as others, especially reformers and Christian socialists, have
maintained, that the excesses and abuses of property have done more
than anything else to stimulate human brutality, selfishness, exploitation,
and misery. Even Jesus remarked on the ethical handicaps of the rich
man.

Some Outstanding Abuses of Property

While conceding the stimulus which property has offered to human
effort in the past, we must also recognize the evils which have followed
in the train of property. In ancient days, perhaps the greatest evil of
private property was human slavery and the exploitation of the masses.
The sad story has been told in the monumental work of C. Osborne Ward,
The Ancient Lowly, a book which has been unfortunately neglected by
students of social history.57 The slave system was probably most ex-
tensive and brutal in the later Roman Republic and the early days of
the Empire. Not only were great numbers enslaved under conditions of
gross brutality and oppression, but the masses were demoralized and im-
poverished. Even when sustained by the state, as in the instance of the
Roman system of bread-and-circuses, the masses lost their morale, initia-
tive, and self-respect.

In the Middle Ages, the property system not only encouraged the
exploitation of serfs, but also the unabashed robbery and pillage carried
on by the medieval nobles and knights. The church itself became
enormously rich at the price of impoverishing many of its loyal followers.
Its avarice was a major cause of the Protestant Revolt. The kings and
princes resented the crushing church taxation, and the religious reformers
were shocked at the degradation of religion by ecclesiastical materialism.

When, at the end of the Middle Ages, absolute monarchs arose, they
created their brilliant, corrupt, and expensive court life on the basis of
crushing exploitation of the majority of the citizens. The nobility
wasted lavishly while the bulk of the nation suffered in want and poverty.
Not infrequently did the court live riotously while famines swept away
thousands of loyal subjects.

More horrible in many ways was the exploitation of the working classes
in the new factories which sprang up as a phase of the Industrial Revolu-
tion. The working conditions in the factories themselves were shocking,
and the hours of labor long. Wages were low, and the apologetic econo-

™ C/. Gore, op. cit., Chap. VII.
" 2 Vols., Kerr, 1907.

196 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

mists contended that they must remain low because only a limited sum —
given the mystic title of "the wages-fund" — could be paid without wreck-
ing industry. An economist of great prestige at the time, Nassau Senior,
maintained that the working day could not be shortened because the
employer had to make all his profits during the last hour. Senior was,
accordingly, dubbed "Last Hour" Senior. The eulogy of property as a
natural right of man and the idea that the chief obligation of government
is to protect property united with the dogmas of the economists to create
stubborn obstacles to factory reform and the promotion of social justice.

We have already discussed certain of the evils which have arisen as a
result of the corporate revolution and the rise of finance capitalism. To
list some of the major evils: It has transformed property owners from
workers and producers into absentee drones. It has enormously increased
the expenses of living. For every dollar which we pay to the pro-
ducer of goods, we pay around $2.30 for overhead, much of which goes to
those who take no active part in economic life. Finance capitalism has
restricted and curtailed productive output to an unbelievable degree.
Even capitalistic experts contend that we could produce approximately
100 per cent more with our present capital plant, were it not for handicaps
imposed mainly by finance capitalism. Radical technicians estimate that
we might produce more than three times as much, if our productive plant
were operated by engineers. Through the maldistribution of income
under finance capitalism, the masses have never been able to buy enough
of any vital necessity. We hear much talk about the surplus of farm
products in this country, but even in 1928 and 1929 only 10 per cent of our
American families were able to buy enough to eat, if they lived according
to the standards advocated by the government of the United States.

Among the evils of property is its opposition to desirable social change
and economic reform. As we have already pointed out, no other influence
has been so powerful as the legal claims of property in suppressing and
thwarting social legislation, and thereby encouraging economic stagna-
tion, inefficiency, depression, and impoverishment. Most important of
all — by making adequate reforms through gradual and democratic
methods all but impossible, it has already brought violent revolutions to
a number of countries, and is inviting revolution in the majority of
civilized states. In this way, property is committing suicide by provok-
ing the establishment of a type of society in which property interests and
holdings will be severely curtailed, if not wholly eliminated.

Finally, the desire to protect and augment private property is an
important cause of war. Indeed, H. N. Brailsford contends that we
cannot logically expect world peace until we abolish private property:
"Our goal of order and peace can be reached only by a relentless concen-
tration on the single purpose of abolishing private property in the means
of life."58 Moreover, as H. D. Lasswell has pointed out, the personal
insecurity produced by the inequalities of property is a strong stimulant

8 Property or Peace, Covici-Friede, 1934, p. 253.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 197

to war in that it generates sentiments of indignation, frustration, reck-
lessness, and rebellion, with the result that rulers attempt to distract
attention by inviting or provoking a war.59

Some Major Inroads on Private Property Today

A direct threat to property comes from crime. We ordinarily think of
crime as taking property through various types of thefts and burglaries.
However, the total loss from all forms of burglary, robbery and thievery
does not amount to more than half a billion dollars annually in the United
States. But the cost of organized crime and racketeering annually
amounts to at least 5 billion dollars. To this we must add another 5
billions for the cost of law-enforcing agencies and the support of appre-
hended criminals. The losses due to gambling each year rim to 5 or 6
billion dollars.

Another serious inroad upon private property, however legitimate an
inroad it may be, is public taxation. And these tax burdens are growing
heavier each year. In 1938, before our armament program began, it is
estimated that the total federal, state, and local expenditures were in
excess of 18 billion dollars. These enormous sums must be raised directly
by taxes or through government borrowing, paid off ultimately by those
possessing taxable property, unless the public debt is repudiated and those
who hold government bonds lose all their investment. The burden of
taxation, even on small incomes, today can be illustrated by the income
tax in England in 1940: 60

Income : Tax

$2,000 $171.25

$4,000 796.25

$6,000 1,421.25

$8,000 2,171.25

With large incomes the rate of taxation is higher, until it becomes con-
fiscatory (100 per cent) in the higher brackets. And income taxes are
but a part of the total tax burden. Since the second World War started,
the income tax rates have been raised, and the government has the legal
power to take a man's complete income and confiscate his property
through a capital levy if the crisis becomes sufficiently acute. Now that
the United States is in the war, our income taxes are likely to rise to the
English level, and a great variety of other taxes are being levied on the
populace.

When taxation becomes unbearable, the next resort is inflation, which,
if carried far enough, wipes out all property values in fixed investments.
Germany got rid of her World War debt in this way in 1923-24. A
friend of the author had at this time an insurance annuity amounting
to 450 thousand dollars. In 1924, it entirely disappeared — not being

89 World Politics and Personal Insecurity, McGraw-Hill, 1935.
6° This is the tax paid by a married man with one child.

198 THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY

sufficient to pay the postage on a postcard to the United States. This is
only a representative example of what inflation does to most property
values.

Perhaps the greatest losses of property have come about through specu-
lation under finance capitalism. The losses in bank failures between
the end of the first World War and the beginning of the New Deal
amounted to at least 5 billion dollars. The paper losses in securities
between 1929 and 1933 were in excess of 100 billion dollars, and the actual
losses were probably a quarter of this sum, perhaps more.61 The case
of Samuel Insull and the Insull utilities, and of the Associated Gas and
Electric Company under Howard Hopson, are only dramatic examples
of the mulcting of investors in holding companies. The depression after
1929, for which finance capitalism has been primarily blamed, has cost
our country over 100 billion dollars in the resulting curtailment of in-
dustrial activity.02

It is generally believed that trust funds, administered by banks and
trust companies, represent the safest possible custody of property. But,
as Fred C. Kelly has pointed out in his book, How To Lose Your Money
Prudently,™ billions of dollars have been lost in trust funds through
unwise investment, lethargy in executing sensible sales and reinvestments,
overt graft between various banks and trust companies, and excessive
commissions and charges. Indeed, it may, perhaps, be said that prop-
erty is safer in the hands of an alert and responsible broker than it is in
a trust fund handled by a bank or trust company.64

The Future of Private Property

Less than a decade ago, Berle and Means predicted that the corporate
revolution was building a new property system which might dominate
the economic future for many years to come. But the economic and
political trends indicate that the world is headed towards momentous
social and economic changes which will sweep away the corporate system
as thoroughly as nationalism and capitalism wiped out the feudal system
o.f the Middle Ages. Even in democratic and capitalistic countries, the
expense of social reform programs and the relief of the poor is bringing
about taxation and increases in the public debt that seriously menace
the existence of the whole property system. Relief cost the United States
13 billion dollars between 1933 and 1939. But, the cost of war is far more
expensive than any past or projected outlay for social reform and relief.
Armament appropriations in the United States in 1941-42 were ten times
as great as the relief expenditures from 1933 to 1940. It is difficult to
see how the system of private property can endure in the face of the
expenditures involved in total war.

61 (?/. J. T. Flynn, Security Speculation, Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
02 Some economists put the loss at twice this figure.

63 Swain, 1933.

64 C/. J. T. Flynn, Investment Trusts Gone Wrong, New Republic Press, 1930.

THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY 199

In Europe, even before the war, the growth of totalitarianism, in the
form of state capitalism and state socialism, had already sounded the
death knell of the system of private property in several important coun-
tries. The virtual obituary of private property came in those countries
when they entered the second World War. Even in Great Britain, which
entered the second World War as an ostensible democracy, there is no
prospect that the system of private property can weather a war of long
duration. Already, all property in Britain has been placed at the dis-
posal of the state, and is being rapidly used up in war — at the rate of
over 50 million dollars a day or 20 billions a year.

Even if the war comes to a speedy end, the outlook for the system of
private property is dark indeed. The burdens of the war are likely to
give a fatal shock to the property system in democratic and capitalistic
states. And there is not the slightest probability that the totalitarian
states will reverse their steps and revive the system of unrestricted
private property.

Even leaving aside entirely the insuperable burdens placed upon prop-
erty by war, it is doubtful if our present empire of machines can be
efficiently controlled under a system of private property and a capitalistic
economy. The economic ideals of Wendell Willkie, however sincerely
held, may fairly be likened to the astro-physical doctrines of Ptolemy.
Some form of collectivistic economy, directed by industrial engineers,
appears to many to be the only system compatible with the technology
of the twentieth century.

PART III
Political and Legal Institutions in Transition

CHAPTER VII

The Framework of Democracy: The National State
and Constitutional Government

An Outline of the History of Nationalism

WE HAVE now come to the point in this volume where we consider
the more important political problems of the contemporary era. These
are closely related to the economic trends analyzed in earlier chapters.
The central problem of contemporary political life, particularly in the
United States, is the fate of democracy. But the problems of democracy
cannot be understood unless we first treat of those political institutions
and practices which are mainly responsible for the problems democracy
faces and which have provided the technique democracy employs in its
operations.

This makes it desirable to preface our treatment of democracy by an
account of the rise and influence of nationalism and party government.
The national state has brought to democracy the major problems with
which it has to cope — the highly complex life of great territorial states,
and the bellicose psychology which creates the threat of war. Party
government has been the only technique democracy has thus devised for
the operation of representative government. In short, nationalism hands
over to democracy the main problems with which it has to deal, while
party government provides the current mode of solving such problems.

The course of the development of nations and national states has been
*a complicated process. So many and deep-seated are the psychic ele-
ments and the cultural characteristics which are carried over from the
tribal period into the political, that it is nearly impossible to fix any defi-
nite period as marking the origin of nations. One can scarcely agree with
Israel Zangwill that the tribally organized Jews of ancient Palestine
constituted a national state, in the sense used to describe the Germany of
Bismarck, Treitschke, and Reventlow, or the Italy of Crispi, Carducci,
and Sonnino. Yet it is not easy to deny his criticism of those writers who
find nations a phenomenon of very recent origin. Rather, it is best to
agree that modern nations have their psychic traits deeply rooted in the
tribal past. The history of nationalism and of nation-building involves
tracing the expansion of cultural entities and the centers of emotional
fixation ; in other words, the record of the expansion and rationalization of
"herd-instinct."

200

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 201

As human society has undergone tremendous transformations in the
period between the gradual breakdown of tribal society and the twentieth
century, differences of corresponding scope have developed between the
expression of group psychology in tribal society and in the national states.
The most profound and far-reaching of these contrasts is the conversion
of group solidarity from blood-kinship, real or assumed, to a definite
territorial habitat, along with the development of what is conventionally
known as "political society." The distinctions will appear clearly only
after a careful historical analysis of the development of the constituent
principles of the nations of today. It is this fact that renders such a
survey of vital importance, entirely aside from the specific content of the
historical facts enumerated.

Tribal Society. Students of cultural anthropology generally agree that
the earliest well-defined units of social organization were either the village
or the clan, both of which were normally linked with others of the same
type in a larger and looser entity — the tribe.

It is difficult to describe tribal government briefly, for there were many
kinds of government in primitive society, from the crudest of social con-
trol in small local groups and villages to fairly well-developed tribal
monarchies.1 As a general rule, however, government in primitive society
was an elementary type of representative government with marked demo-
cratic tendencies. The council of chiefs was at times chosen by undemo-
cratic methods and was rather tyrannical in its government. Usually,
however, it was elected by the tribesmen and ruled with due consideration
for group traditions. There is little evidence that women ruled under
what has been called a matriarchal system. Women sometimes had
unusual political power, as in the case of the Iroquois, but men always
held the dominant political posts. Modern research has upset the old
idea that democracy had its birth in the tribal assemblies of the Germans
and was passed on directly by them to the Anglo-Saxon peoples and
Americans. Democracy is a product of modern conditions and not a
heritage from the primitive past.

While much of the psychology of tribal relationships has been carried
over into modern society, the contrasts between tribal society and the
modern national state are many. Tribal society was primarily based
upon blood-kinship, either real or assumed, and tribal relations were
personal rather than political. Force, custom, and blood-feud were the
foundation of tribal juristic concepts and methods. The "instinct of the
herd" had a much fuller sway over the group than it has at the present
day. Cultural solidarity was more intense and there was little personal
individuation, except that which set off a few leaders. An intense reli-
gious loyalty and deep attachment to all the symbols of group unity were
ever present. So powerful was the domination of the group over the
individual that some eminent students, such as Emile Durkheim and his
school, have claimed that all categories of religion and thought were

1 Lowie, Primitive Society, Liveright Publishing Corporation, Chap. XIII.

202 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

derived from expressions of; and reactions to, group life. Indeed, Emile
Durkheim held that the essence of religion is only the psychic exuberance
or stimulation arising from group life and activities, and Wilfred Trotter
holds the "instinct of the herd" to be the primordial and all-pervading
psychic force which has controlled man from the origin of the race to the
present day.

Whatever may be the exaggerations of these writers in matters of detail,
it is generally agreed that the struggle for the preservation and extension
of group solidarity has been the basic factor in the evolution of mankind,
and it was inevitable that the psychic traits developed in this process
would become deeply grounded in the mental life of humanity:

Man is in fact fundamentally social by nature. He has never lived in isolation
but always in groups. Lacking special organs of defense he found strength, as did
the ants and the bees, in group solidarity. Consequently, the struggle for exist-
ence on the human plane has been fundamentally a struggle of group with group.
Since his survival turned largely on the perfection of his gregarious instinct, there
has been achieved in man a keen sensitiveness to the call of the group. This herd
instinct, as Trotter calls it, is, therefore, the very basis of human society and the
most profound aspect of man's social nature. It is for the group what the instinct
of self-preservation is for the individual. It is aroused only in times of stress and
danger; group fear in some form is essential to its development; when awakened
it not only grips every tribesman in an atmosphere of electrified suggestibility, but
stirs within his bodily mechanism the internal secretory apparatus whose proclucts
are essential to deeds of valor. It is in its strength and vigor an assertion of the
group will to live, and is therefore as deep and mysterious and indeed as perma-
nent as the eternal nisus of nature, the insistent push of everything that throbs
with life and energy.2

Tribal groups were relatively small. While such groups often held with
great tenacity to particular areas, it was because of the economic advan-
tages, such as better fishing or hunting grounds, rather than a purely
territorial attachment. There was little hesitancy in leaving a particular
locality to follow migrations of game or fish:

Patriotism, the love of one's terra patria, or natal land, is a recent thing. Dur-
ing far the greater part of his existence man has wandered over the earth's face
'as a hunter and can hardly have had any sweet and permanent associations with
the tree or rock under which he was born. But the fore-runners of territorial
emotion were the group loyalties of the tribe, clan, family and totemistic group,
in whatever order and with whatever peculiarities these may have originated and
come to exist side by side.3

Early City-States. The transition from tribal groupings and modes of
life to the city-state, the earliest type of true political organization, was
gradual and slow. The chief contrast between tribal society and that of
the proto-historic city-states was that, in the latter, the basis of group
relations gradually came to be political and territorial, rather than purely

2F. H. Hankins, Patriotism and Peace, Clark University Press, 1919.
3J. H. Robinson, The Human Comedy, Harper, 1936, p. 269.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 203

personal and consanguineous. Very often there was an intermediate
political stage between tribal society and the city-state, which we call
feudalism. Here the relations were partly personal, those of patron and
client, and partly territorial, based on the possession of lands by the
feudal lords.

Groups tended to consolidate about certain vantage points, determined
by considerations of fortification and protection, religious sentiment,
economic superiority, or better potentialities for brigandage. Stability
replaced the earlier nomadic life, and the habitat became more or less
permanent. The early city-states did not, however, resemble the modern
urban centers of life and industry. Life was still primarily agricultural,
and the "city" was little more than a citadel surrounded by the homes of
the peasants who retired within the walls in time of danger.

As trade developed and the division of labor between city and country
was established, the early city-states assumed more of an industrial and
commercial character. The coming of foreign merchants created those
problems of assimilation and the extension of citizenship which were a
chief force in breaking down the remaining vestiges of tribal society and
in creating the origins of the modern political order. A few historical or
semi-historical instances of this all-important change from tribal to civil
society have been preserved in historical records. Such were the occupa-
tion of ancient Palestine by the Jews and their subsequent choice of a
king; the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes in Attica at the close of the
sixth century B.C.; the alleged reforms of Scrvius Tullius in early Rome
and the subsequent constitutional struggle between the patricians and
plebians; and the breakdown of Teutonic tribal society and the establish-
ment of political relations in the interval between Arminius and Alaric —
the transition which Paul Vinogradoff called "one of the most momentous
turning-points in the history of the race."

The city-states of antiquity were soon submerged in the patriarchal
empires which arose in the "state-making age" through the superior force
and aggressiveness of one of these cities. The ancient Egyptian Empire
was a product of the forcible subjugation of the city-states of the Nile
Valley; the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian empires were built up out
of the progressive amalgamation of the city-states of the valleys of the
Tigris and Euphrates, and the coast of Asia Minor.

Only the cities of ancient Hellas retained their independence long
enough during the historical period to give us any adequate conception of
the type of cultural solidarity and political reactions which characterized
the antique city-state. Here personal and kinship relations were replaced
by the institution of citizenship, based upon residence and naturalization,
instead of blood-relationship or elaborate initiation ceremonies. Groups
were generally more populous, and civilization more advanced than in
tribal society.

Most of the psychic characteristics of tribal life, however, were present
in a modified degree in the civilization of Athens, which may be taken as
the most advanced product of the ancient city-state civilization. Group

204 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

solidarity was still intense. The elements of common culture were prized,
even to the extent of being vested with a sacred significance. Ceremonies,
costumes, legal forms and political practices, moral codes, religious fes-
tivities, and even amusements were tinged with the divinity of their
alleged origin. The gods were limited to a particular political group and
were regarded as solicitous for its welfare. The attitude toward for-
eigners was well exemplified by the well-known contrast between "Greek
and Barbarian," in which Aristotle was able to find a justification for the
subjection of inferior peoples to the Greek "genius" for governing. The
group leaders passed, after their death, into the realm of the gods or
supermen, and their magnified prowess became a highly prized group
possession.

When fixity of habitat had become the rule, a new attachment to terri-
torial possessions arose. Not only were specially sacred places, such as
Olympus and Delphi, prized and venerated, but the whole habitat of the
group was valued as a special gift from the gods. Aristotle found that
the fortunate situation of the Greeks in their geographical habitat served
sufficiently to explain the "superiority" of Greek genius.

The ancient city-state was so' important a stage in political and cultural
evolution that we may well include Hutton Webster's colorful summary
of its characteristics:

A Greek or Roman city usually grew up about a hill or refuge (acropolis,
capitolium), to which the people of the surrounding district could flee in time of
danger. This mount would be crowned with a fortress and the temples of the
gods. Not far away was the market place (agora, forum), where the people
gathered to conduct their business and enjoy social intercourse. About the citadel
and market place were grouped the narrow streets and low houses of the town.
Thus an ancient city was closely built up and lacked the miles of suburbs that
belong to a modern metropolis. . . .

Each of these numerous cities was an independent self-governing community.
It formed a city-state. Just as a modern nation, it could declare war, arrange
treaties, and make alliances with its neighbors. Such a city-state included not
only the territory within its walls, but also the surrounding district where many
of the citizens lived. It was usually of small size. Aristotle once said that "a
city could not consist of ten men, nor again of one hundred thousand." By this
he meant that a city ought not to be so small that no community life was possible
in it, yet not so large that a man could not know many of his fellow-citizens. . . .

The members of an ancient city-state were very closely associated. The
citizens believed themselves to be descended from a common ancestor and so to
be all related. They were united also, in the worship of the patron god or hero
who had them under his protection. These two ties, the tie of supposed kinship
and the tie of a common religion, made citizenship a great privilege which came
to an individual only by birth. Elsewhere he was only a foreigner without legal
rights — a man without a country. . . .

To the free-born inhabitant of Athens or of Rome his city was at once his
country and his church, his club and his home. He shared in its government; he
took part in the stately ceremonies that honored its patron god; in the city he
could indulge his taste for talking and for politics; here he found both safety and
society.4

* Ancient History, Heath, 1913, pp. 165-166, 562-563.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 205

The government of city-states was usually an aristocratic type of repre-
sentative government. The majority of the inhabitants were often ex-
cluded from citizenship and were not allowed to take part in government.
This was the case even in Athens. Some city-states were kingdoms and
others were called democracies. In both cases, however, the council was
the most important element in the government. In kingdoms, the council
might be aristocratic and hereditary or it might be chosen by the members
of the city aristocracy. In democratic city-states, the council was elected
by the citizens, and the latter frequently met as a body to discuss public
problems and pass fundamental laws. Representative government began
in primitive society, but it rested on a kinship rather than a political and
territorial basis. The city-state created a representative system based on
territorial residence and a truly civic life. The democratic city-states
were such in name only. All the citizens might participate in government
but the citizens were always a minority of the whole population. In some
city-states, like Sparta, we find a system of military socialism which was
a forerunner, on a small scale, of contemporary totalitarianism.

The ancient city-states made notable advances toward transforming
group life from the tribal to the modern national basis. Had their
progress not been arrested by the development of the great patriarchal
empires, the national state in its fullness might have been a product of
antiquity. For better or worse, this was not to be, and even Athens was
swallowed up in the imperial domains of the Macedonian conqueror after
its African and Asiatic prototypes had long before bowed to the might
of Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Nineveh, Ecbatana, Sardis, and Susa.
James Bryce has admirably described the general absence of anything
approaching a national cultural or political unity before the conquests of
Rome:

Men with little knowledge of each other, with no experience of wide political
union, held differences of race to be natural and irremovable barriers. Similarly,
religion appeared to them a purely local matter; and as there were gods of the
hills and gods of the valleys, of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced in
its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of other countries who worshipped other
gods as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings. Such feelings, if keenest in the
East, frequently show themselves in the early records of Greece and Italyj in
Homer the hero, who wanders over the unfruitful sea, glories in sacking the cities
of the stranger; the primitive Latins have the same word for a foreigner or ati
enemy; the exclusive systems of Egypt, Hindostan, China are only the more
vehement expressions of the belief which made Athenian philosophers look upon
a state of war between Greeks and barbarians as natural, and defend slavery on
the same ground of the original diversity of the races that rule and the races
that serve.5

The Patriarchal Empires of Antiquity. The formation of the far-flung
autocratic patriarchal empires, in what Walter Bagehot has somewhat
loosely called "the nation-making age" was one of the sweeping trans-
formations in the political evolution of humanity. Paradoxical as it

5 Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, Macmillan, 1900, pp. 80-90.

206 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

may seem, the empires both stifled and promoted the growth of nations
and national unity. Their development was invariably brought about by
the cumulative extension of the power and prestige of some powerful and
aggressive city-state at the expense of its neighbors. This very process
naturally produced an enormous inflation of group pride and egotism on
the part of the conquering city. On the other hand, while subject cities
were severely treated and their national culture sternly repressed, nothing
makes a group so proud and tenacious of its cultural possessions as
persecution, and the conquerors unwittingly only intensified the partic-
ularism and local pride of such subject communities. Prior to the rise of
Persia, the history of the ancient empires is, in part, a record of constant
warfare produced by the attempts of the ruling city and dynasty to
suppress the revolts of subject cultural groups.

We can illustrate the character of the more highly developed ancient
empires by briefly describing the remarkable Persian Empire of the fifth
and sixth centuries B.C. Never before had so extensive an empire existed.
The victory over Egypt in 525 B.C. meant that the Persian Empire
stretched from the Nile in the west to the mountain frontiers of India in
the east. In extent and in excellence of administration and organization,
only the Roman Empire of later centuries can be compared to it among
the political achievements of antiquity.

The organization of so vast an empire was a problem of the first magni-
tude. The task, begun by Cyrus, was completed by Darius the Great in
the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Following an older Sumerian tradition,
Darius was called the Ruler of the Four Quarters of the Globe, and the
government centered in his hands. In attempting to create unity out of
the heterogeneous elements which composed this vast empire, the Persian
rulers made a radical departure from the traditional practice of the
Near East. They permitted the distinction between conqueror and con-
quered— between the rulers and the subject peoples — slowly to disappear.
The conquered regions, or satrapies, which under the older system were
distinguished by the payment of tribute, gradually acquired the status
of provinces. Later on, the word "satrapy" simply implied an adminis-
trative unit of the empire, and even Persia itself became a satrapy, though
it enjoyed certain special privileges.

What was here attempted, though never completely realized, was the
establishment of a heterogeneous empire bound together, in fact united,
through the ties created by an administrative system. Each administra-
tive division, each satrapy, was ruled by a governor (a "satrap") and
other officials appointed by the king. This, too, was an innovation, for
the subjects of the older empires had usually been ruled by natives. In
addition to the satrap, who was essentially a civil officer, a general and a
secretary were stationed in each province. Royal commissioners, called
the "Eyes of the King" and resembling the later missi dominici of Charle-
magne, traveled through the empire inspecting the satrapies and reporting
to the ruler. In the time of Darius there were twenty administrative
divisions in the empire.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 207

Much of the harshness, cruelty, and terrorism of Assyrian rule were
absent from the Persian system. Persian rule was not only milder, but
it was clearly one of tolerance. The attempt to establish unity did not
progress far beyond the political sphere. Little effort was made to en-
force the use of the Persian tongue and cuneiform script, or the Persian
religion, Zoroastrianism. As a matter of fact, Aramaic became the com-
mon language of imperial business, and the local languages remained in
use. The same is true of social customs and economic conditions. In
these matters the localities were unmolested and continued to practice
their old habits. The imperial structure was simply superimposed upon
the life of the subject peoples, which continued with little modification.
Even in local government, many sections of the Persian Empire continued
under the same forms of rule they had possessed before their conquest,
especially the Phoenician and Greek cities in Asia Minor.

This process of ancient empire-building culminated in the expansion
of imperial Rome, in its task of absorbing most of the then-known world
and of bringing into existence the ideal "reign of universal peace" and
uniform law. The process of Roman expansion marked the nearest
approximation to the spirit and methods of aggressive nationalism. The
crude and almost tribal expression of collective egotism in "international"
policy; the public theory that all her wars were "defensive" and that
Rome was always threatened by aggressive states ; the alleged conviction
that the gods were always favorable to these defensive wars; the control
of diplomatic and military policy by the landed "Junker" aristocracy —
the Senate; the ambition for private or family glory in war, as manifested
by Claudius in the first Punic War and by Flaminius in the second Mace-
donian War; the "surplus population" argument for expansion; the
"scrap of paper" attitude toward treaties as evidenced in the second
Samnite War; the harsh and brutal treatment of conquered populations,
extending to the devastation of fields, the burning of cities, and the en-
slaving of populations; the insatiable greed for further expansion; the
disregard of the "rights of small nationalities" — all of these aspects of
Roman expansion sound exceedingly modern.

The formation of empires was influential in creating that tradition of
the glory of territorial expansion which serves as an important impulse to
the aggressiveness of the modern national and territorial state. However,
it should not be forgotten that there was a most radical difference between
the political and cultural basis of such a far-flung political entity as the
Roman Empire and the compact German Empire of a few decades ago.
Though there was a universal political system, there was little cultural
homogeneity or common sentiment of loyalty, which are the indispensable
foundations of the national state. Only the citizens of Italian Rome felt
any emotional thrills or shared patriotic reactions at the triumphal pro-
cessions of conquering emperors or generals and at the recitation of the
Virgilian epic of the growth of the Pax Romana. Though the subject
peoples might acquiesce in the apotheosis of the Roman emperor and
render formal allegiance, they retained their deeper loyalty and allegiance

208 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

to their own pantheon. A common spontaneous patriotism and a uni-
versal loyalty to the sovereign imperial state were quite unknown in the
ancient empires, and the cultural homogeneity which must precede the
political expression of national life was as remote from realization. Even
the prevailing political philosophy — Stoicism — decried the sentiments of
nationalism and patriotism, and lauded the notion of the brotherhood of
man and the cosmopolitanism of world-citizenship:

No quarrels of race or religion disturbed that calm, for all national distinctions
were becoming merged in the idea of a common Empire. The gradual extension
of Roman citizenship through the coloniae, the working of the equalized and
equalizing Roman law, the even pressure of the government on all subjects, the
movement of population caused by commerce and the slave traffic, were steadily
assimilating the various peoples. . . . From Rome came the laws and language
that had overspread the world; at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their
labor; she was the head of the Empire and of civilization, and in riches, fame and
splendor far outshone, as well the cities of the time as the fabled glories of
Bablyon or Persepolis/1

Had Rome continued to exist with an efficient method of imperial ad-
ministration and communication for some centuries after Diocletian, it
might have been possible for her to have welded her diverse subject popu-
lations into a single loyal and unified national unit, but the experiment was
not permitted to continue. In 378 A.D., the Teutonic barbarians from the
North, who had been gradually filtering into the empire for three cen-
turies, broke their leash and started on their migrations, which submerged
the ancient world in a return of preclassical barbarism, and produced a
Clovis, a Charlemagne, and an Otto the Great to repeat the tasks of an
Agamemnon, an Alexander, and an Augustus. The ancient world, then,
passed away, without producing the prototype of the modern national
state, but it laid the psychological and political basis upon which the latter
could develop. Nevertheless, growth of the modern national state has
been, to a large degree, a process sui generis, primarily independent of
ancient impulses, even if influenced by ancient models.

The Middle Ages: Feudal Politics and Universal Culture. The politi-
cal, social, economic and cultural conditions of the "Middle Ages" were no
better adapted to the production of the national state than imperial
antiquity. The unit of political organization and administration was the
domain of the feudal lord, which varied greatly in extent. Usually the
domain was but a small isolated element in the feudal hierarchy, and it
made for political decentralization. The center of social life was the
infinite number of isolated and minute medieval manors — village commu-
nities— and the few small and scattered medieval towns. These were
isolated, self-sufficient, and narrowly selfish and provincial, and were not
well adapted to providing any firm economic foundations for national
unity.

Feudalism dominated the political scene during the Middle Ages, so we

6Bryce, op. cit., pp. 26-27.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 209

may pause for a brief description of this important stage of political evo-
lution. Feudalism has been a general, if not quite universal, stage in the
evolution of society and political control. Its two fundamental charac-
teristics are: (1) partial protection of the helpless members of society, and
(2) their exploitation by the noble classes for economic and military
purposes. In return for the protection of his clients against robbery and
invasion, the lord demanded that the clients work for him, help him in his
own raids and brigandage, and follow him into war. The relationship
binding the overlord and his clients together was primarily a personal one,
as distinguished from the real or fictitious blood relationship of primitive
society, and the territorial and political foundations of later civil society.
Feudalism is always encouraged by a breakdown of social systems and
by the resulting necessity of turning to powerful personages for protection
and security.

From the period of the later Roman Empire until the twelfth century
more or less intermittent anarchy existed in western Europe. The admin-
istrative power and authority of the Roman Empire disintegrated. The
middle class was crushed as a result of bearing most of the financial
burdens of taxation because of the defiant default of the landed aristoc-
racy. This left in Roman society an arrogant and anarchic agrarian
aristocracy at the top, and at the bottom a vast mass of free and semi-
servile men, who lacked protection and economic security. Therefore, the
poor free men tended to give up their freedom in return for protection.

From the German side an evolutionary process was contributing to
feudal developments. Between the time of Tacitus and Clovis kinship
society broke down among the Germanic peoples. Feudalism followed in
natural sequence. Free men banded together in the comitatus under the
leadership of powerful individuals in order to assist in raids and secure
a part of the booty, and to attain protection. To these domestic condi-
tions were added foreign intrusions that also encouraged feudal develop-
ments. First came the invasions of the Huns, which strengthened the
power of the warrior class among the Germans and intensified the con-
fusion in the later Roman Empire. Next came the alarming incursions of
the Muslims. Finally, there were the Viking raids, which carried death
and destruction throughout northwestern Europe and threw the common
people and their lords together for the purpose of mutual salvation. For
centuries everything seemingly worked toward localism and personal
relations in society, and against strong and centralized political dominion.
Medieval feudalism was the outcome.

In earlier periods feudalism had represented an institutional step in
advance — progress from kinship society toward civil society. This was
true of medieval feudalism, as well, insofar as it applied to barbarian
peoples emerging from kinship society. But in the case of regions and
populations that had once been a part of the Roman Empire it was a
retrogression from more highly developed civil society.

Medieval feudalism was a merging of personal, economic, and political
elements, From the personal side Rome contributed the patrocinium, or

210 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

the practice of an unprotected man's joining himself to a powerful patron
for protection. Germany added the comitatus, whereby the underlings
not only received protection but also willingly took part in the raids and
wars of the leaders, and received their share of the booty. The Muslim
invasion transformed this relationship devoted primarily to brigand-
age into a firmer system involving organized military service. The
patrocinium and the comitatus were merged through the institution of
commendation (commendatio) , to constitute the vassalage of medieval
feudalism, which involved not only protection but military obligations.

On the economic side we start with the Roman prccarium. This was
the land or other property handed over by the helpless free men to fur-
nish the local lord with some material incentive to guarantee his protec-
tion. The Germans added nothing comparable in this economic phase
of feudalism. But the necessity of raising soldiers to repel the Muslims
led the Prankish kings to seize church lands and to confer them upon
their followers to obtain the soldiers, horses, and other items necessary
for warfare. In short, dependents of lords were given what was called
the beneficium in return for reciprocal military obligations. In due time,
it became usual for the vassal to hand down to his descendants the bene-
ficium conferred upon him by his lord. When the beneficium became
definitely hereditary and carried with it the obligation to furnish military
equipment and other feudal aids, it became the fi,cj, the material core
of the feudal system.

Had the king been powerful enough to assert his authority over the
local communities of his realms, there would have been no particular
need for feudal institutions. As soon as kings became sufficiently strong
to govern their realms and to protect their subjects, the feudal system
disintegrated. In the meantime, politics and law rested upon the insti-
tution of immunity. That is, the feudal lords owed specific feudal obliga-
tions to the kings. Once these were met, the lords enjoyed essential
sovereignty on their own domains. They were legally, as well as prac-
tically, immune to royal interference, and were empowered to govern
and control their own realms in harmony with the prevailing practices of
'feudal law and administration. Decentralization was supreme, and so
remained until the feudal system gave way in the face of the rising tide
of nationalism and royal strength.

Set off against the actual political diversity and localism of the feudal
system was the political symbol of unity and cosmopolitanism — the Holy
Roman Empire. Whatever its actual weaknesses, its symbolic power
over the mind of Europeans was sufficient to cause so ardent a nationalist
and so blase an advocate of Realpolitik as Frederick the Great to bow
before it, even in the days of its declining strength. A universal moral
and religious control over medieval life was provided by the Roman
Catholic Church, whose growth has been described as "the rise of the new
Rome." The medieval church exerted control over the religious, and to
a large extent the mental, life of the medieval period. With the aid of
the inquisition against heresy, it brought about a degree of psychic unity

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 211

throughout Europe never before equaled. Under its greatest popes, such
as Innocent III, the Church also exercised a degree of control over Euro-
pean politics never matched by any emperor of the period. The three
leading crowned heads of Europe were in turn disciplined by Innocent.
The Church prescribed a single theology for all western Europe, which
was embodied in the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa
Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. Since theology was regarded,
throughout the medieval period, as the "queen of the sciences," and since
education was chiefly in the hands of the churchmen, the realm of learn-
ing was no less unified than was the spiritual world.

There was a striking unity of language and literature during the me-
dieval period. The vernacular languages and literatures began to appear
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but Latin was the language of
politics, business, and learning throughout western Europe during the
greater part of the medieval period. The literature read by those who
were able to read was not less uniform than the language. The Bible,
the works of the leading "Fathers," the crude Latin encyclopedic compila-
tions by Isidore, Rhabanus Maurus, and Vincent of Beauvais, the theo-
logical and pedagogical manuals, and the few classical texts on logic, law,
and medicine were almost the only books read until the prose and verse of
the vernacular languages began to appear at the height of the medieval
period. Even Aristotle was read in Latin translations. Lord Bryce has
characterized the remarkable unity which was, at least Symbolically,
brought to the medieval period by the Church and Empire:

It is on the religious life that nations repose. Because divinity was divided,
humanity had been divided likewise; the doctrine of the unity of God now
enforced the unity of man, who had been created in his image. The first lesson
of Christianity was love, a love that was to join in one body those whom sus-
picion and prejudice and pride of race had hitherto kept apart. There was thus
formed by the new religion a community of the faithful, a Holy Empire, de-
signed to gather all men into its bosom, and standing opposed to the manifold
polytheisms of the older world, exactly as the universal sway of the Caesars
was contrasted with the innumerable kingdoms and republics that had gone
before it. The analogy of the two made them appear parts of one great world-
movement toward unity; the coincidence of their boundaries, which had begun
before Constantine, lasted long enough for him to associate them indissolubly
together, and make the names of Roman and Christian convertible. Ecumen-
ical councils, where the whole spiritual body gathered itself from every part of
the temporal realm under the presidency of the temporal head, presented the
most visible and impressive examples of their connection. The language of civil
government was, throughout the West, that of the sacred writings and of wor-
ship; the greatest mind of his generation consoled the faithful for the fall of
their earthly commonwealth, Rome, by describing to them its successor and
representative, the "City which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is
God." 7

Despite this unique prevalence of the universal and the uniform in
fact and symbol during the medieval period, forces were working be-

7 Bryce, op. dt., pp. 90-91.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

neath the surface that were to rend asunder this century-old artificial
unity. As early as the Strassburg Oaths of 842, there could be detected
the first beginnings in the differentiations of language which were t<*
lay the literary basis for national diversity and rivalry. The revival
Of Roman law in western Europe in the twelfth century became a
powerful instrument for royal supremacy and the rise of the dynastic
state. The new commerce with the east, which had been built up by the
Italian cities in the period of the Crusades enriched the Italian city-
states, which first successfully defied the principle of imperial unity.
The breakdown of the principle took place in northern Europe, when the
opening of the new trade routes to the east and west ushered in the
"Commercial Revolution" and with it the dawn of the Modern Age.

The Rise of the National State. At the opening of the sixteenth cen-
tury a number of new forces and influences made for the creation of
national spirit and a national state. Perhaps the economic factors were
the most potent. The Roman Catholic Church imposed heavy taxes
Upon the various nations of Europe. For example, at some periods in
medieval Europe the amount of money which went to the church far
exceeded that which went to the king. Around the opening of the six-
teenth century there was a trend toward heavier taxation, in order to
raise money for a new building campaign carried on by the Church,
which, at this period was particularly wasteful and extravagant. The
various princes and kings were naturally eager to escape, so far as pos-
sible, from these heavy financial demands made by the Church on their
realms. Hence they welcomed the movement led by Luther and other
Protestant reformers, especially since this movement provided a con-
venient religious and moral cloak for their motives.

Other and major economic influences making for nationalism in early
modern times grew later out of exploration, colonization, and the ensu-
ing Commercial Revolution. It was believed that each state should
closely control its own and its colonies' economic and commercial life, in
order to increase national prosperity and the income of the national
treasury. This belief made the nation that industrial and commercial
unit we know as a Mercantile state. Mercantilism dominated European
economic policy generally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The American Revolution was an effort to combat the enforcement of
mercantilist^ regulations.

Religious factors also made for nationalism. The politic.al rulers not
only wished freedom from taxation by Rome but they also desired to
control the religious life of their kingdoms. The Catholic challenge to
the political absolutism of the king during the Middle Ages had been
regarded as an annoying nuisance and a menace by the political poten-
tates. Religious reformers, like Luther, despairing of bringing about
adequate religious reforms within Catholicism, advocated overt secession
from Rome. Th6y were rendered indispensable assistance by the political
rulers, who had good financial and religious reasons for favoring -the
Protestant revolt. In the case of England, Henry VIII added a -highly

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 213

personal element to the general picture, namely his desire to divorce
Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn. In return for the aid rendered by
princes and kings, the Protestant leaders tended to give their blessing to
the monarchs and to the spirit of nationalism.

Dynastic ambitions of European rulers — Ferdinand and Isabella and
Philip II in Spain, the Tudors in England, the Bourbons in France, the
Hohenzollerns in Prussia, the Hapsburgs in Austria, and the Romanovs
in Russia — promoted nationalistic expansion and unification until the
days of Bismarck. They desired to enhance their personal prestige and
the strength and extent of their realms through war and conquest. This
was the main factor which led to the creation of relatively large and
well integrated national states in modern Europe and throughout the
western world.

By the time of the famous Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, the national
state had become a recognized institution in the public law of Europe.
Yet there was little popular enthusiasm for nationalism — little which
could properly be called national spirit. Nationalism was still primarily
a matter of dynasties, religious dogmas, and economic interests, which
did not inflame the masses. Popular enthusiasm was first brought to
nationalism by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The
French masses were deeply stirred by the successful wars which the
revolutionary leaders waged against the European reactionaries. The
slogan of Fraternity galvanized the French nation. Frenchmen were
even more thrilled by the dramatic successes of Napoleon. Among the
enemies of Napoleon, nationalism and patriotism were given a popular
basis through the necessity of waging war against conquest and absorp-
tion. English, Prussian, Spanish, and Austrian nationalism were par-
ticularly stimulated as a defense reaction against Napoleonic aggression.

The popularization of national sentiment carried over from the Napo-
leonic period into the nineteenth century and provided psychological
support for the unification of Germany and Italy in 1870, and for the
later rise of nationality in the Balkan states, which, incidentally, served
to set off the first World War.

If nationalism was to be both popularized and rendered permanent,
it needed a real nervous system for the communication of emotions and
ideas. This was provided by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of
modern science, which brought into being the telegraph, telephone, radio,
cheap daily newspapers, and moving pictures. This made it feasible to
keep alive a vivid national sentiment, even when there were no wars
to stimulate and heighten national excitement.8 The Industrial Revo-
lution also contributed powerfully to the system of nationalism by pro-
ducing an ever greater body of goods to be sold, thus encouraging legis-
lation for the protection of the home market, such as tariff laws, which
emphasized the economic unity of industrial states.

The national state has passed through many stages of governmental

s See below, pp. 219-221.

214 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

practice. It first produced the absolute monarchies of early modern
times under Philip II of Spain, Henry VIII of England and Louis XIV
of France. The reign of the latter is usually regarded as the culmina-
tion of both the glories and miseries of absolute monarchy.

Next came what is often called Enlightened Despotism. Representa-
tive of such rulers were Elizabeth of England, Frederick the Great of
Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Joseph II of Austria, and Charles
III of Spain. While the people had little to say about government under
the enlightened despots, the latter did try to rule according to what they
believed was the best interests of their subjects.

Representative government, in which elected legislatures became su-
preme in government, first appeared, in any important state, in England
after the Revolution of 1688. It grew up in America in the English
colonies and took on a national expression in the new federal government
of 1789. Then it came to France after the French Revolution. In the
nineteenth century, it gradually made headway in the other major
states of Europe, with the exception of Russia, which maintained its
absolutistic system until the first World War.

Representative government was undemocratic at first. Only a mi-
nority elected the members of legislatures. The earliest example of
democratic government in a large state was that of the United States
after Andrew Jackson democratized our federal government following
1829.

Nationalism in the United States. The rise of nationalism in the
United States is the most impressive achievement of its kind in the New
World. As E. P. Cheyney so convincingly indicated, the settlement
of America was more closely connected with the economic impulses
arising from the Commercial Revolution in Europe than it was with
the religious revolts from Catholicism on the Continent and the Estab-
lished Church in England. These new commercial forces were most in-
fluential in promoting unity among the colonists. A century of virtual
ignoring of British commercial restrictions, making smuggling a powerful
vested interest, gave the thirteen colonies a strong common motive for
Vinified action in opposing the proposed enforcement of the long-dormant
mercantilist^ restrictions after 1763 — a motive that A. M. Schlesinger
has fully proved to have been far more powerful than any theoretical or
legal abstractions involved in colonial resistance to British imperial
power.

In addition to these economic origins of American national senti-
ment, there was also at work a fundamental sociological process, which
has been aptly termed by Carl Lotus Becker "the beginnings of the
American people." A geographical, social, political, and economic en-
vironment, much different from that of Europe, had long been operating
upon a population psychologically more daring than the great mass of
Englishmen who remained at home. This tended inevitably to create in
the colonies a people who became, generation after generation, more
and more divergent in mentality and institutions from their kinsmen in

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 215

the mother country across the Atlantic. A fairly homogeneous and
united American people was being created, and the beginnings of a na-
tional self-consciousness were coming into being.

Initiated (in part unintentionally) by the enterprising and recalcitrant
merchants, the American Revolution was favored by the debtor landlords
and disgruntled frontiersmen and carried to success by courage and
audacity, by the not disinterested aid of the French, and by the aid of
the British Whigs. The revolt furnished a unifying force of great
potency for a time, but the reaction in the days of the Confederation
threatened a lapse into anarchy and dismemberment. Thanks, however,
to their desire for financial stability and commercial prosperity, the
vigorous capitalistic class, led by the great constructive statesman of
early nationalism, Alexander Hamilton, turned the tide of political opin-
ion from separatism and provincialism to nationalism and unity. The
work was carried on by the strongly nationalistic court decisions of John
Marshall, whom not even Jefferson's emnity could remove from the
Supreme Court. Indeed, the Jeffersonian Republicans, when they came
into power in 1801, abandoned their localism and accepted most of the
nationalistic program that they had criticized with such vigor and
acrimony. Jefferson could purchase Louisiana; Madison could be won
for war with Great Britain; and Monroe could formulate a strongly
nationalistic foreign policy.

Nationalism in America, as in Europe, was completed by the Indus-
trial Revolution. The new factories in the North created an industrial
interdependence among various sections of the country and attracted
an immigrant population with no sectional sentiments. The new canals
and railroads helped on that great nationalistic enterprise of the nine-
teenth century in America — the conquest of the west, studied with such
fruitfulness by Frederick Jackson Turner and his disciples. While the
territorial additions were temporarily a cause of sectional dispute and
friction, they ultimately became a matter of national pride and common
interest. Though Negro slavery, and the accompanying states-rights
movement, threatened to disrupt the embryonic nation, the success of
the North in the Civil AVar demonstrated by the verdict of physical force
that Webster, rather than Calhoun or Hayne, was right in his interpre-
tation of the nature of the federal union.

Events and tendencies since the Civil War have been even more con-
ducive to the development of national unity. An industrial revolution,
like that which affected New England in the first half of the nineteenth
century, has come to the South, and the sharp sectional divisions of
economic interests have now been greatly lessened. The further de-
velopment of the means of rapid transportation and almost instantaneous
communication of information have made our extensive country an
economic and psychological unit to a degree unknown in a much
smaller area in 1789. The intersectional investment of capital has also
encouraged financial unity.

A national literature has been provided by such writers as Irving,

216 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Haw-
thorne, Poe, Clemens, Howells, Riley, and Garland. A collection of
the sources of national history was planned and partly executed by
Peter Force, and a national historical epic, eulogizing the American past,
was created in the writings of Bancroft, Palfrey, Fiske, Hoist, and Bur-
gess. Elaborate national expositions and public projects, such as the
Chicago World's Fair (1893), the St. Louis Exposition (1904), the Cen-
tury of Progress Exposition at Chicago (1933-34) and the World's Fair
in New York (1939-40), have furnished a series of impulses to unity.

Many pessimists believed that the great influx of foreigners into the
United States in the last fifty years threatened national disruption. But
the experience of the United States in the first World War definitely dis-
proved their forebodings and demonstrated that, whatever the other
results of immigration, it has not brought national disintegration.

A "glorious" foreign war at the close of the century gave a great
stimulus to the completion of national development. The participation
of the United States in the first World War produced a welling-up of
exuberant national sentiment and an intolerant patriotism that caused
both the Entente and the Central Powers to gasp with astonishment and
incredulity. Organizations of ex-soldiers devote themselves to perpetuat-
ing this state of mind.

Nationalism in the Western Hemisphere has not been limited to the
United States. The Dominion of Canada, despite a formal connection
with Great Britain, has developed a marked spirit of national self-con-
sciousness. A century or more of independent political existence has
created a strong spirit of national unity and pride in the Latin American
countries. Nationalism seems as well established in the Americas as in
Europe.

While nationalism was a main cause of the first and second World
Wars, it seems likely that the second World War will gravely modify,
if it does not suppress entirely, the national-state system. As H. N.
Brailsford, W. H. Chamberlin, and others have suggested, there is not
much likelihood that small national states will survive the present world-
conflict. A few great states, far exceeding nationalistic boundaries, with
lesser states within their spheres of interest, are likely to emerge when the
war is over. Regional federations will probably supplant national states.

The national state has been based on a territorial and property founda-
tion, and representative government has been operated by means of terri-
torial, or district, representation. But the more alert and progressive
political theorists are inclined to believe that the territorial state is now
giving way to the functional state. Though the external boundaries of
a country may remain as before, the political organization and operations
within the country will be markedly transformed. Instead of voting
through territorial districts, voters will choose their representatives as
members of vocations or functional groups. In other words, bankers,
industrialists, lawyers, teachers, farmers, mechanics, and the like, will
elect representatives to the various state and national legislatures. It is

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 217

held that this system will give greater logic and honesty to representative
government.9

Whether or not this is a sound theory, there are many signs that this
transformation is under way. This system has been adopted, in differing
degrees of thoroughness, in some European countries. In this country,
the lobby, which is really a vocational representative body, is frequently
more powerful than the legislatures themselves. If territorial representa-
tion is supplanted by functional or vocational representation, it will con-
stitute as sweeping a political revolution as the transition from tribal to
civil society at the dawn of history.

We may conclude this historical survey with a brief summary or outline
of the outstanding stages, periods, or types of political evolution:

I. Tribal Society:

Kinship basis.

Personal relations.
II. The Transitional Period of Feudalism:

Personal relationships.

Quasi-territorial basis of politics.

III. The Territorial State and Civil Society:

City-states.
Patriarchal empires.
The national state:

Absolut istic.

Representative.

Democratic (usually republican).

IV. The Functional Society of the Future:

Political federations and spheres of interest.
Functional or vocational representation.

Nationalism, State Activity, and the Growing
Complexity of Political Problems

To national spirit and dynastic aggression we owe, primarily, the
origin of the large political states of our day. It was a matter of pride
and satisfaction to carve out these great territories and bring them under
the wing of a particular dynasty or political authority. No tremendous
new political responsibilities were imposed, because the economy was then
still a simple and rudimentary one. Most of the great national states
were built up either in a pastoral or agricultural era, or on the eve of the
new industrialism. While it was natural that the problems of admin-
istration would be somewhat extended and complicated with the addition
of new territory and populations, political problems still remained essen-
tially simple and rudimentary. They did not threaten to swamp the
political intelligence or administrative methods of earlier eras.

But this simplicity of life and of political problems soon passed away.
The empire of machines arose. Cities came into being in ever greater

See below, pp. 263-266.

218 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

numbers and on an ever larger scale. New problems of industry and
transportation appeared which required public regulation. The fiscal and
commercial policies of states became ever more extensive and complicated.
New forms of poverty, dependency, and social pathology came into being
and demanded the attention of political authorities. Mass movements
of population and international migrations demanded a definite political
policy. New questions of public health arose. Crime became more com-
plicated and menacing. Even agriculture lost its earlier directness and
simplicity, became mechanized, and required extensive public attention.
The ravages of industrialism made it essential to turn to problems of
conservation.

At the same time, a change came about in political philosophy. The
old notion that the state should act chiefly as a policeman, simply protect-
ing life and property, gave way before the notion that the state must
assume responsibility for social welfare and must regulate an ever in-
creasing number of social and economic processes. The philosophy of
laissez-faire was supplanted by that of state-activity. Even those par-
ties and groups which emphasized the fact that there should be as little
government as possible in business inevitably had to accept a degree of
state intervention in economic life which would have amazed, and per-
haps appalled, Alexander Hamilton and other earlier apostles of state
intervention. The administration of Herbert Hoover, for example, made
that of George Washington appear almost a condition of political anarchy
by comparison.

Nationalism thus handed down into our complicated urban, industrial
world civilization large political units, the so-called national states. As
the problems which must be dealt with by political agencies became more
numerous and complex, the national state system began to add markedly
to the difficulties of political control over human life and social institu-
tions. Political problems were difficult enough in small states with few
inhabitants. The more extensive the territory and the larger the popu-
lation of a state, the more numerous and complicated were the problems
of politics. The great political units of our day, which brought so much
pride to their original creators, now became in many ways a political
liability.

The major public problems of our era baffle experts, to say nothing of
the rank and file of political legislators and administrators. The populace
at large is usually woefully ignorant of the facts concerning any major
public issue. To submit such issues to a popular referendum is becom-
ing ever more ludicrous, but such is the necessity in democratic procedure.
It would be regarded as ridiculous to propose a plebiscite on some com-
plicated problem of astronomy or physics today. But the more im-
portant economic problems, which must be dealt with through politics,
such as the farm problem, the utility problem, the transportation prob-
lem, or the money problem, are far more complicated than any single
issue of astronomy or physics.

Some few years ago Irving Fisher suggested that only about a dozen

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 219

men in the world were really fitted to discuss the problem of money with
competence. An enterprising organization took him at his word and
sent out a questionnaire to the experts he named, asking for their
opinions on certain major monetary facts and principles. The results of
this questionnaire revealed clearly that even the leading experts could
not agree upon the most essential phases of monetary theory. And the
money problem is one of the clearest and simplest of the economic
problems of our age.

Democracy is frequently attacked because it is said that it cannot
muster the intelligence to deal with the difficulties of our era of civiliza-
tion. There may be a great deal of truth in this indictment. But we
must remember that it has been the national state, projected into an
era of industrialism and urbanism, which has been responsible for many
of the current perplexities of democratic government. Had democracy
been able to operate in the small political units, for which it was recom-
mended by its original sponsors, it might have continued to work with
eminent success. Indeed, it has been eminently successful in a number
of the smaller states of the western world — such as Sweden, Finland, and
Switzerland.

Nationalism, Patriotism, and War Psychology

A century or so ago the prevailing and most common psychological
unit in human society was the neighborhood. It had been such for
countless centuries. Along with many good qualities, the neighborhood
produced several less lovely psychological traits, such as smugness, pro-
vincialism, and hostility and suspicion toward outsiders.

So backward was the general level of thought and social interests on
the eve of the Industrial Revolution that the sudden development of
means for quickly communicating the prevalent attitudes throughout the
modern national state tended to give to national thought and emotion
the same self-satisfied provincialism sand smug arrogance that had earlier
prevailed on a local scale. The inhabitants of whole national states
came to entertain towards their neighbors much the same sentiments of
suspicion and hostility that dwellers in neighborhoods and local com-
munities had once possessed towards strangers from outside. Therefore
it is not surprising when James Harvey Robinson finds that: "Our an-
cient tribal instinct evidently retains its blind and unreasoning character-
istics despite the fact that we are able nowadays, by means of newspapers,
periodicals, railroads, and telegraphs, to spread it over vast areas, such as
are comprised in modern states like Germany, France, Russia, and the
United States." Carlton J. H. Hayes has very effectively stated the
relation of the Industrial Revolution to this spread of national sentiment
and of nationalistic propaganda:

Without the Industrial Revolution, it would be impossible to raise funds, to
supply textbooks and material equipment, or to exercise centralized supervision
and control requisite to the establishment and maintenance of great systems of

220 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

free universal schooling. Without the Industrial Revolution, it would be im-
possible to take all able bodied young men away from productive employment
and put them in an army for two or three years, feeding and clothing and hous-
ing them and providing them with transport, arms and hospitals. Without the
Industrial Revolution, it would be impossible to produce huge quantities of
journals, to collect news for them quickly, to print them in bulk, to distribute
them widely, to have a numerous public to read them and much advertising
to pay for them. Without the Industrial Revolution, it would be impossible for
a propagandist society to flood a large country with written and oral appeals. . . .
The technological advance itself is not more favorable to one purpose (na-
tionalism) than to the other (internationalism). It can be used for either or
for both. In fact, it has been used for a century, and is still used, preeminently
for nationalist ends. Societies, journals, and schools, as well as armies, are
today predominantly nationalist, and the nationalism which they inculcate tends
to bo more exclusive and more vigorous. Indeed, economic development seems
to be a handmaid to nationalist development, rather than the reverse.10

The development of new means for the communication of information,
as a result of the Industrial Revolution, made possible a true psychic
unity within each nation, broke up local isolation, and completed the
process of popularizing national sentiment and perfecting national self-
consciousness. It made the various national manifestations of the "herd
instinct" more communicable, more responsive, and more liable to sudden
and hysterical explosions. It also has rendered "jingoistic" expressions
in other countries better known and more likely to arouse antagonisms.
Great national states have thus been rendered as cohesive and inflam-
mable as local neighborhods were some generations back:

In our modern life there is more of instantancousness than there has ever been
in the world before. Never since the world began was it possible to conceive such
a situation as this: that one hundred and twenty million people stretching over
a continent, an imperial expanse, should think and feel simultaneously. By
radio we all hear the same fact at the same time. It may happen to be six
o'clock in New York when I hear it, and two o'clock in California when some-
body else hears it; but however the clocks may vary, the instant in time is
identical. The isolation that once existed when news traveled slowly, advancing
in waves, reaching first one area, then another, then a third, with the first having
time to meditate about it before it became a universal idea — all this is a thing
of the past. Now we not only get the same idea at the same moment, but we
all react to it at the same time. Therefore, what was once an inescapable
moment of meditation vouchsafed to most of us before the universality of an
idea was accomplished, is now abolished.11

Neighborhoods, however smug, suspicious, and arrogant, could not,
however, go on a rampage and wreck civilization. An entire rural com-
munity, armed with all the available muskets, pitchforks, scythes, and
rolling-pins, could not do a vast amount of damage to society as a whole.
But great national states, equipped with the formidable armaments of our

10 C. J. H. Hayes, Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism, Farrar & Rinehart,
1931, pp. 23&-241.

11 Newton D. Baker, "The Answer is Education," Journal of Adult Education,
June, 1931, p. 265. See also O. W. Riegel, "Nationalism in Press, Radio, and
Cinema," American Sociological Review, August, 1938, pp. 510-515.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 221

day, can wreck civilization. Indeed, they are making good headway at
it right now.

The first World War was, in part, brought about by nationalistic psy-
chology and it dealt a severe blow to democratic institutions. Though it
was fought to make the world safe for democracy, the greater part of
Europe today, from the standpoint of both territory and population, has
gone over to dictatorship. It was an even more ruthless and intense
nationalism that fanned the flames of arrogance and hatred into a new
fever heat and brought about the second World War in September, 1939.

It is to nationalism, then, that we owe two of the major problems which
confront contemporary democracy, namely: (1) the enormous increase
of political complexities and difficulties, as a result of large territorial
states in an industrial era; and (2) the intensification of national senti-
ment on a large scale, which threatens and produces destructive war
and imposes greatly increased financial and diplomatic responsibilities
upon modern states.

The Rise of Constitutional Government and the
Ascendancy of Republics

The ideals of the middle class from the seventeenth century to the
twentieth are clear enough — nationalism, freedom for business enterprise,
the protection of property, and the guarantee of civil liberties. But it
was necessary to do something more than to enunciate and eulogize these
ideals. They had to be applied, made permanent, and be protected. In
short, it was necessary to create constitutions, which would embody
these ideals and make them the basis of the law and politics of the state.
Hence the growing power of the middle class and the success of revolutions
were everywhere accompanied by the rise of constitutional government.

Back of the rise of all constitutions lie basic aspirations and principles.
First, there is the conception of a higher or absolute law, to which any and
all secular rulers are subordinate. Second, there is the doctrine of pri-
mordial and inalienable individual rights — such as life, liberty, and
property. Finally, there is the notion of a sacred written charter, em-
bodying the higher law and personal rights, and immune to change except
through a formal and indubitable expression of the public will. Con-
stitutional government states the supreme law, enumerates individual
rights, and places all on semi-sacred parchment.

A constitution may be defined in general terms as the organic instru-
ment of government. It creates the form of political institutions, enu-
merates the functions of political machinery, and also prescribes the
rights and immunities of the individual citizen. For example, a con-
stitution determines whether or not a state will be a monarchy or a
republic; it may prescribe either executive or parliamentary ascendancy
in the government, or it may distribute the powers of government equally
among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as is theoretically
done in the United States; it may describe in detail the nature, terms,

222 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

and mode of election of the various members of each department of the
government; and it may specifically enumerate the liberties and im-
munities of the individual citizen under the particular form of govern-
ment created. In short, the constitution defines and describes the legal
rights of the citizen and the structure and operation of the government
that is to make him secure in the enjoyment of these rights. As Walton
H. Hamilton puts it: "A law for the government, safeguarding individual
rights, set down in writing — that is the constitution."

A constitution may be a very precise written document, worked out all
at one time by a specific constitutional convention. Or, it may be a col-
lection of documents and precedents running over many centuries. Our
Federal Constitution is a good example of the first, and the English con-
stitution of the second.

Since the middle of the seventeenth century, constitutions have been
mainly the creation of the middle classes. But any dominant class can
make and operate a constitution. Constitutional government may well
support a landed aristocracy, as does that of Hungary today. It may
just as well bring into being a proletarian regime that virtually outlaws
both the landed nobility and the middle-class capitalists. Such has been
the result of the constitution of Soviet Russia in our day. But thus far
in modern history the movement for constitutions has been so closely
linked with the program and activities of the middle class that we may
almost identify the desire for, and the creation of, constitutions with the
interests and strategy of that class. Down to 1789, the middle-class con-
stitutions were designed to protect property from assault by royalty and
nobility — those socially above the middle class. The United States set
the precedent in creating a constitution to protect property against in-
dustrial workers and peasants — that is, to protect the middle class from
those below it. The violence in Shay's Rebellion and other uprisings
of the desperate and embattled farmers and the first rumbles of labor
organization frightened the property owners. Therefore, they drew up
a constitution which rendered property relatively immune from any
radical legislation and made the amendment of the constitution very
difficult, so that the property class was not likely to lose control of the
government. This protection of property from the depredations of the
lower classes was made still more impregnable after the Civil War by
the "due process" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The political institutions and policies of the Western world since the
seventeenth century have reflected the economic, social, and political
ideals of the capitalistic middle class. These were chiefly legal protec-
tion of property, enforcement of contract, and a large degree of freedom
in personal and business initiative. Everywhere the bourgoisie have
opposed state interference with economic activities, except where this
interference has been believed to foster their interests. They have been
opposed to social legislation designed to protect the working classes and
hence likely to hamper the freedom of the employer to deal with his
employees as he sees fit.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 223

Most modern constitutions have embodied these fundamental bour-
geois ideals of freedom from arbitrary governmental interference and
have assured the protection of personal rights and property interests.
The fundamental rights and immunities for all men and the appropriate
guarantees of economic liberty were embodied in the first ten Amend-
ments to the American Constitution — really an integral part of the
document, since they were all added immediately. The French Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man, drawn up in 1789, mentions property among
the "natural and imprescriptible rights of man" in Article 2, and in
Article 17 also describes it as "an inviolable and sacred right."

The relative stability of constitutional governments and their specific
guarantees of political and economic rights to the propertied classes have
been the chief reasons why the triumph of the bourgeoisie in politics
throughout the Western world has been followed by the immediate
adoption of written constitutions. The degree of fixity and rigidity in
constitutional government varies greatly. In Great Britain, Parliament
can theoretically amend the constitution with as little formal difficulty
as it meets in passing a bill appropriating a petty sum for repairing a
local bridge. In the United States the process of amendment is so diffi-
cult that only twelve Amendments have been added to the original ten
adopted a hundred and fifty years ago. But even in England constitu-
tional changes are infrequent and never undertaken in a lighthearted
manner, chiefly because of the British reverence for precedent and their
reluctance to experiment. In practice, then the English constitution is
not so easy to alter in any fundamental sense. Almost without exception,
constitutions have been changed slowly and infrequently, and constitu-
tional government has been characterized by relative rigidity and per-
manence. The middle class have thus far been vindicated in their re-
liance upon constitutional government as a safeguard against either royal
arbitrariness or proletarian radicalism. It is easy to understand the
devotion of contemporary American businessmen to the Constitution.

While the first important written constitution of modern times was the
so-called Instrument of Government, drawn up by Cromwell for his
Commonwealth government, constitutions^ are by no means a product
of modern history. Aristotle is said to have studied the text of some 158
constitutions, to serve as the basis of his book on the Athenian Constitu-
tion. The forerunners of modern written constitutions were the charters
granted to the medieval towns, to the English colonies in America, and
to chartered trading companies. The English constitution is a curious
combination of various documents. Among the most important of these
documents are the Magna Charta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628),
the Bill of Rights (1688-1689) and the legislation immediately following
it, the Reform Bill of 1832, the Suffrage Acts of 1867, 1884, and 1918,
the Parliament Bill of 1911, and the Suffrage Acts of 1918 and 1928.
Among the other things that go to make up the English Constitution, are
"the privileges of Parliament," the Conventions of the Constitution, the
Common Law, and the like.

224 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

The first great crop of written constitutions in modern society were
those adopted by the American states after the Declaration of Inde-
pendence. They were founded on the precedents of the colonial charters,
the revolutionary doctrines of the British Whigs, and the Bill of Rights
of 1689. These early state constitutions in America almost perfectly
exemplified the political ideals of the middle-class liberals. The aris-
tocratic and monarchical elements in government were eliminated, espe-
cially the hereditary executive. Special privilege and hereditary rights
were denounced. The doctrine of popular sovereignty and the assertion
that all powers were originally given to the government by the people
were boldly and universally proclaimed.

The French philosopher Montesquieu maintained, about the middle of
the eighteenth century, that the chief guarantee of liberty lies in a proper
separation of governmental powers into executive, legislative, and
judicial branches, and in an elaborate system of checks and balances.
This doctrine was embodied very generally in these American state con-
stitutions. The lingering fear of the king was reflected, nevertheless, in
a general tendency to exalt the legislature at the expense of the execu-
tive department. Short terms for governors were the rule. John Adams
said that annual elections were the only safeguard against tyranny.

The laissez-faire tendencies of the economic liberalism of that time
were accepted, and the functions of government were limited to the pro-
tection of life, liberty, and property. Any extensive development beyond
this was frowned upon. Yet there were some vestiges of aristocracy and
privilege. Property qualifications for voting and office-holding were
common, and even religious qualifications for office and the ballot were
frequent.

Constitution-making was carried to a national scope in the Articles of
Confederation of March, 1781. But these were weak and inadequate.
A Constitution embodying strong federal principles was framed in 1787
and adopted by 1789.

The French Revolution produced a number of constitutions, all pro-
foundly influenced by British and American precedents. The one of
1791, which provided for the creation of a limited monarchy under the
Legislative Assembly, was more widely followed as a model than the
later and more radical constitutions, because at this time limited
monarchy aroused fewer objections from conservative minds than did
republican government. Napoleon popularized constitutional govern-
ment. Even though he ruled with an iron hand, he governed under con-
stitutional forms in France and handed out charters and constitutions
to his subject territories. A famous and influential constitution of the
Napoleonic period was that adopted in Spain in 1812, based on the
French constitution of 1891. This constitution, proclaiming popular
sovereignty and parliamentary government, was widely studied by the
European liberals in their struggle for constitutions between the Congress
of Vienna (1815) and the Revolutions of 1848. It was also widely
imitated by the Latin-American peoples. The constitution of industrial

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 225

Belgium, influenced by the British constitution, and adopted and approved
in 1830-1831, was especially admired by middle-class liberals and'widely
copied.

From 1815 to 1848 the battle for constitutions met many and serious
rebuffs at the hands of Prince Metternich. He knew that constitutions
almost always involve representative institutions, and, hence he recog-
nized their threat to the system of autocracy that maintained him in
power. But after 1848 his influence waned. The Kingdom of Piedmont
and Sardinia obtained a constitution in 1848, which developed into the
constitution of United Italy. The King of Prussia granted a constitu-
tion in 1850, which lasted with few changes until the close of the first
World War. The Emperor of Austria was compelled to establish con-
stitutional government in 1861. The minor European countries adopted
constitutions at various times during the nineteenth century, particularly
after 1850. The Latin-American states entered the constitution-making
age in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Those states which adopted constitutions relatively late had a decided
advantage in studying the experience of earlier constitutional systems.
Most of the constitutions of Australasia embody, for example, the best
features of the English and American constitutions. The dozen or so
states that came into existence in Europe after the first World War
adopted constitutions which, in many cases, embodied not only previous
political experience but also novel principles of political science, such as
proportional and vocational representation. The Turkish constitution
conferred remarkable powers upon the executive. In Russia, and in
Spain for a time, constitutional government was turned against wealth
and privilege and made a bulwark of proletarian radicalism. A. C. Flick
summarizes the extent and significance of this era of constitution -making:

Between 1776 and 1850 well on towards a hundred written constitutions were
created throughout the world. For the most part they represented political
victories won by the people for democracy and nationality. Many of them
stood as protests against the oppression of a motherland, such as the new
American states against Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal. Others embodied
hostility to control by other lands, as Belgium against Holland, Greece against
Turkey, and Italy and Hungary against Austria. Some stood as revolts against
tyrannical rulers as in France, Spain, Getmany, and Austria. Others incorpo-
rated internal demands for reform, as in Switzerland and Holland. Taking
these documents as a whole, they measure the decline of absolutism and mark
the progress of the world in liberty and equality.12

In the rise of Fascism and dictatorship after the first World War there
was a strong tendency to abandon representative government, though
there is no reason why a constitution may not readily be founded upon
the most extreme Fascist principles. But the most striking aspect of the
rise of Fascism is the implication that the middle class have lost con-

12 A. C. Flick, Modern World History, Knopf, 1928, p. 215.

226 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

fidence in representative government as a means of protecting the vested
interests of property. A main reason for this lies in the increasing
strength of the working class in contemporary society, and the consequent
demand of this class that constitutions shall express their interests as well
as those of the middle class.

In Russia the working class seized power and, for the first time in
human history, drew up a working constitution which represented prole-
tarian interests. In the same way that many bourgeois constitutions
outlawed revolution and made property secure from working-class at-
tacks, in Russia private property in the instruments of production was
outlawed, and only members of the working-class were allowed to par-
ticipate in government. The Russian Soviet constitution represents the
very opposite extreme in class interests and control from the constitution
of the United States.

The conception of the divine right of kings has come down to us some-
what modified in the theory of the divine status and sanctity of constitu-
tions. The existence of constitutions has, indeed, begotten a perverted
mental attitude towards them known as "constitutionalism." This has
been defined by Professor Hamilton as follows:

Constitutionalism is the name given to the trust which men repose in the
power of words engrossed on parchment to keep a government in order. The
writing down of the fundamental law, beyond peradventure and against mis-
understanding, is an important political invention. It offers exact and endur-
ing language as a test for official conduct at the risk of imposing outworn stand-
ards upon current activities.13

The vested interests frequently ignore the fact that our constitution was a
result of many compromises, and looked upon by its framers as a very
imperfect experiment.

The theory of the divine right of kings became archaic and out of
adjustment with the social and economic interests of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Constitutions that were drawn up a century or
a half-century ago have likewise been found poorly adapted to the needs
of a far different civilization from that which presided over their drafting.
This defect is likely to become even more serious in the face of future
cultural alterations, which take pl£ce with far greater rapidity today than
ever before. Further, constitutions, which are but a means to the end
of orderly and free government, have come to be regarded as an end in
themselves. It is doubtful if the excesses of divine-right panegyric under
Louis XIV were greater than the absurdities of constitution eulogy in
our own age. It is difficult to keep in mind or practice the basic truth,
so well phrased by Thomas Jefferson, that constitutions are made to
serve society and that society does not exist to serve constitutions. A
characteristic product of the constitution cult is the following excerpt from
an address by an eminent corporation lawyer, Henry D. Estabrook, cited

ia "Constitutionalism," Encyclopedia oj the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 4,
p. 255.

NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS 227

in Harry F. AtwoocTs Back to the Republic, a book that has enjoyed an
amazing popularity with the American plutocracy:

And so, on this great continent, which God had kept hidden in a little world
— here, with a new heaven and a new earth, where former things had passed
away, the people of many nations, of various needs and creeds, but united in
heart and soul and mind for the single purpose, builded an altar to Liberty,
the first ever built, or that ever could be built, and called it the Constitution
of the United States. . . .

O marvelous Consitution! Magic parchment, transforming word, maker,
monitor, guardian of mankind! Thou hast gathered to thy impartial bosom
the peoples of the earth, Columbia, and called them equal. Thou hast conferred
upon them imperial sovereignty, revoking all titles but that of man. Native
and exotic, rich and poor, good and bad, old and young, lazy and the industrious,
those who love and those who hate, the mean and lowly, the high and mighty,
the wise and the foolish, the prudent and the imprudent, the cautious and the
hasty, the honest and the dishonest, those who pray and those who curse — these
are "We, the people of the United States" — these are God's children — these are
thy rulers, O Columbia. Into our hands thou hast committed the destinies of
the human race, even to the omega of thine own destruction. And all thou
rcquirest of us before we o'erstep boundaries blazed for guidance is what is
required of us at every railroad crossing in the country: "Stop. Look. Listen."
Stop and think. Look before and after and to the right and left. Listen to
the voice of reason and to the small still voice of conscience.14

These abuses in the form of constitution worship have been most
evident in the United States, in part because of the antiquity of the
American Constitution and in part because of the degree to which this
document is a bulwark of the vested propertied interests. This attitude
appears not only in such silly brochures as the one just quoted, but also
in such $ pretension to sober scholarship as James M. Beck's The Con-
stitution of the United States.15 That a recognition of this state of
affairs does not necessarily imply any subversive attitude may be seen
from the judicious criticism of the American constitutional system in
William MacDonald's A New Constitution for a New America, the work
of an eminently conservative, respectable, and balanced writer, wholly
devoid of any violently revolutionary motives, and in W. Y. Elliott's
The Need for Constitutional Reform.

But it should be remembered that constitution worship, intellectually
indefensible as it may be when used as a mask for the advantage that it
lends the vested propertied class, ought not so to antagonize its opponents
that they forget that any constitution, along with its archaic and in-
equitable sections, usually embodies many guarantees and safeguards
of personal liberty that have been won during the age-long growth of
social conscience.

While constitutions may be provided for monarchical, aristocratic,
democratic, and totalitarian forms of government, the middle class have
been very generally favorable to the republican form of government.

14 H. F. Atwood, Back to the Republic, Whitman, 1926, pp. 66-67.

15 Cf. T. R. Powell, "Constitutional Metaphors," in the New RepMic, February
11, 1925, pp. 314-315.

228 NATIONS, CONSTITUTIONS AND REPUBLICS

Monarchy has symbolized to them, on the basis of the historical expe-
riences of previous centuries, arbitrary royal rule and interference with
their business and prosperity. Bourgeois political supremacy has, there-
fore, generally been followed by the establishment of the republican
form of government and the adoption of written constitutions. This has
not been invariably true, because, in certain instances, the monarchical
tradition has been too strong for the middle class to uproot at once.
One must, of course, be on his guard lest he take it for granted that a
republic necessarily means a more liberal form of government than can
exist under a constitutional monarchy. The formal monarchy of Eng-
land, before 1939, provided a government more democratic and more
responsive to popular will than does the republic of the United States.
Even Nazi Germany saw fit for a time to retain the fiction of a republic.

Though the republican form of government has been the usual ex-
pression of middle-class political liberalism in modern times, it is well
known that republics are in no sense an exclusively modern institution.
Republican government was fairly common among the Greeks. Rome
remained a republic for hundreds of years. In the Middle Ages there
were city-state republics, such as Genoa. Switzerland became a republic
in 1291.

The first important republic of modern times was the Dutch Republic,
which was formed in 1579 and lasted for two centuries. A far more ex-
tensive republic appeared on this side of the Atlantic when the United
States of America was given permanence by the Federal Constitution,
framed 1787. The First French Republic came into being in 1792. The
Second French Republic lasted from 1848 to 1852. The Third French
Republic was declared in 1870 and assured in 1879. The revolutions
in Latin America after 1810 usually brought into existence what were
at least formally called republics, however dictatorial the rule of the
leader. In South Africa the Boers established two republics: the Orange
Free State in 1836 and the Transvaal in 1852.

After the first World War a considerable crop of new republics sprung
up in Europe. Among them were Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, the
Baltic Republics — Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland — The Union
of Socialist Soviet Republics, Portugal, and Spain. The Soviet Republics
and the Spanish Republic of 1933-1938 have well illustrated the fact
that republican government need not be inseparably connected with the
dominion and aspirations of the middle class. In both of these countries
republican forms of government have been used to advance the interests
of the radical proletariat and the peasantry.

CHAPTER VIII

The Technique of Democracy: Political Parties
and Party Government

The Role of Political Parties in Modern Government

IN THE preceding chapter we traced the rise of the national state and
the growth of constitutional government. Within this framework repre-
sentative government and democracy have developed in modern times
and have given us the characteristic political system of our day. In
this chapter we shall consider the technique whereby representative gov-
ernment and democracy have been able to operate. So that represent-
ative government and democracy may work, some method must be found
for assuring majority rule and placing the representatives of the people
in a position of political power. Thus far in human experience the only
practicable method of so doing that has been discovered is party govern-
ment. Representative government and the development of antagonistic
social and economic interests in contemporary society — industrial, finan-
cial, commercial, agricultural, and proletarian — have begotten party poli-
tics as a natural mode of procedure.

In contemporary western society, outside of totalitarian states, the
average citizen participates in political life chiefly as a member of a
party. His interest in politics centers mainly in the victory of a given
list of party candidates. The average voter has little conception of the
general nature or purpose of government. He grasps feebly, or not at all,
the fundamental issues that are involved. His whole political outlook
is concentrated upon the entity or organization known as the political
party, and upon the candidates and symbols that give to the party
vitality and personal interest.

Realistic students, however, look upon the political party not as a
spontaneous benevolent association but as the public organization through
which the various interest-groups in modern society seek to promote their
specific objects and ambitions. These interest-groups must compromise
with each other in organizing a great party. For this reason, considerable
latitude exists in party platforms or whatever serves as the basis of party
unity. The strongest parties are those which can unite the largest
assemblage of persons in a single interest-group or can combine in a
harmonious manner, without sacrificing aggressiveness, the largest num-

229

230 PARTY GOVERNMENT

ber of interest-groups. This conception of the political party has been
concisely summarized by Bentley:

The party gets its strength from the interests it represents, the convention
and executive committee from the party, arid the chairman from the conven-
tion and committee. In each grade of this series the social fact actually before
us is leadership of some underlying interest or set of interests.1

Charles A. Beard has also expressed the fundamentally economic basis
of party activity and organization as an outgrowth of interest pressures:

The grand conclusion, therefore, seems to be exactly that advanced by our
own James Madison in the Tenth Number of the Federalist. To express his
thought in modern terms: a landed interest, a transport interest, a railway
interest, a shipping interest, an engineering interest, a manufacturing interest, a
public-official interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in all
great societies and divide themselves into different classes actuated by different
sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests,
whatever may be the formula for the ownership of property, constitutes the
principal task of modern statesmen and involves the spirit of party in the
necessary and ordinary operations of government. In other words, there is no
rest for mankind, no final solution of eternal contradictions. Such is the de-
sign of the universe. The recognition of this fact is the beginning of wisdom —
and of statesmanship.2

Sociologists are inclined to hold that, in spite of all obvious selfishness
and corruption, party strife is the chief dynamic agency in promoting
political progress and stimulating healthy political activity. In the same
way that the physical conflict of social groups created the state and
modern political institutions, so the more peaceful struggle of parties
within the state secures the continuance of political evolution.

The psychological technique through which party leaders dominate
the party and manipulate public opinion has been incisively analyzed by
Graham Wallas and others.3 The political issues that concern mankind
are not approached by the majority of citizens as a complex of ideas and
desires. They are recognized through the association of a political prob-
lem with some symbol. Therefore, while a party may have a conscious
intellectual origin and be designed to achieve a definite social end, it has
little strength or duration unless it secures symbols with sufficiently high
emotional values, such as party animals, colors, tunes, names, rhetoric,
catchwords, and the like. A skillful party makes use of its symbols in
the same way that a commercial concern employs its trademarks and
advertisements. If a candidate is not properly vested with symbols he
has no chance of success. The most insignificant nonentity, properly and
fully identified with the party symbols, is much more likely to be suc-
cessful in an election than the strongest personality in the country, if the

1 A. F. Bentley, The Process of Government, University of Chicago Press, 1908,
p. 225.

2C. A. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics, Knopf, 1922, p. 99.
8 See Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, Houghton, Mifflin, 1909.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 231

latter has cut himself off from party connections and makes an appeal
solely to the intelligence and good judgment of the citizens.

The two-party system, the exception rather than the rule in democracies,
has been perpetuated in our country for a number of reasons. Down to
1861 there were numerous and frequent shifts in the major parties, mak-
ing it possible for minor parties to participate in the formation of new
major parties. There has been little real radicalism in the country since
the Revolutionary War. Hence radical parties have not appeared with
frequency and popular psychology has been hostile towards those which
have arisen. When liberal third parties have developed, it has been
usual for one or both of the major parties to appropriate the more
attractive and popular portions of their platforms, thus speedily break-
ing up the third parties.

Further, the two major parties have long had a special psychological
hold on the masses. The Democrats appeal to tradition and proudly
point to the fact that their party has endured for over a century, un-
changed even in name. The Republicans call attention to the fact that
they saved the -Union and allege with a straight face that they have been
responsible for our remarkable economic expansion and material pros-
perity since 1861.

Moreover, labor and agriculture, nominally the source of distinct in-
terests and special party movements, have been unable to form united
and permanent political parties. Labor did not become well integrated
until after the Civil War. The Knights of Labor might have formed
a labor party, but their career was cut short too quickly. The policy of
the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers was to keep
labor out of politics as a distinct party and to seek favors from one or
another of the major parties. Moreover, there can be no real labor party
until the American proletariat accepts the permanence of its status. This
the American laborers have thus far refused to do. They have regarded
themselves as potential capitalists and have been more interested in
rising above the laboring groups than in improving themselves within
their proletarian status. The frontier optimism and individualism of
"the American dream" have persisted in them long after the frontier has
ceased to exist. Radical labor in the United States has been too much
divided into bitter cliques to form powerful and permanent party or-
ganizations. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) may pro-
vide the basis for a Labor party in the United States. However, in
1936 Mr. Lewis threw his cohorts to Mr. Roosevelt and in 1940 he at-
tempted to line them up for Mr. Willkie and the Republicans.

With the exception of sporadic developments, such as the Greenback,
Granger, Populist, Progressive, and Non-Partisan League movements,
the farmers have been loyal to the old parties, rebelling only briefly in
moments of near-starvation and losing their rebellious secession spirit
with a rise in the price of agricultural products.

In Europe, before totalitarianism set in, there were in most countries
a multiplicity of parties, a number of which were frequently united into

232 PARTY GOVERNMENT

blocs or groups. This has been true because, in Europe, party organiza-
tion has been more normally and naturally associated with the underly-
ing interests of the various groups and classes. Moreover, there have
been more classes and interests in Europe than in the United States —
everything from monarchists to communists and anarchists. And within
each major group there has been an inclination to split over minor inter-
pretations of social, economic, or political dogmas. Further, party ma-
chinery is less powerful and cohesive in Europe than in the United
States.

The bloc system naturally invites disorganization and chaos, as com-
pared to the two-party system, but at least the parties do stand for
something definite. The choice is, essentially, between the unreality of
the two-party system of the United States and the chaotic character of
the bloc system of Europe. The latter seemed to be winning out before
1939. Even England, long the home of the two-party system, had in
1939 a half-dozen definite parties represented in the House of Commons.
Even the old parties, such as the Liberal, were beginning to split up.
The futility of the two-party system in the United States is becoming
increasingly apparent. Whatever one's preferences in the matter, it
certainly seems that the interests in modern society are too diversified
and numerous to allow adequate expression through the medium of two
political parties. There would need to be at least three parties — a con-
servative, a liberal, and a radical party.

While there is a trend towards multiple parties in democracies, the
new totalitarian states have installed one-party systems. But there the
party does not function as a phase of representative government. It is
chiefly a propaganda agency and an administrative errand boy for the
dictatorship and bureaucracy which run all totalitarian states.

The Rise of Party Government

Factions representing distinct interest groups have existed from a very
early day, though party government, as a publicly recognized agency,
could scarcely appear until after the rise of representative government.
In the Greek city-states, especially in Athens, there were political parties
or factions. Aristotle, in fact, made an analysis of the genesis and nature
of factional, party, and class activity, though he himself clearly disap-
proved of these divisions. But there was no permanent party organiza-
tion in Athenian democracy, much less any recognition of the party as
a factor in political society. The Romans produced vigorous political
factions, but here again political factions and interests shifted rapidly.

After the collapse of Rome, the western world broke up into the feudal
system. With such world-order as existed being furnished by the church
and the unifying tradition of Rome, there was still no place for party
government. The feudal political relations of the Middle Ages were
based chiefly upon personal allegiance, a condition somewhat interme-
diate between the bond of blood relationship (real or fictitious) , in primi-
tive society, and the political status of developed civil society. The

PARTY GOVERNMENT 233

chief struggle during the Middle Ages was that between the church and
the state, but such conflicts were partly international in their scope, and
they rarely produced any permanent party alignment upon the questions
at issue. The struggles within the church, which culminated in the
Conciliar Movement of the fifteenth century, were also international in
scope and more directly productive of representative government than
of the party system.

The factions or parties that, at times, existed in the medieval period
are well exemplified by the historic conflict between the Guelphs and
the Ghibellines. These parties were produced by the struggle between
the Holy Roman Emperor and the Italian city-states, but their conflicts
were, in part, personal, family, or municipal feuds, carried on with great
bitterness. The other form of political conflict that prevailed in the
Middle Ages, especially in the latter part of the period, namely, that
between the newly developing cities and the feudal lords or the king,
was a conflict of different types of society rather than party strife.

The origins of modern political parties are tied up with the Commer-
cial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, which created a middle class
powerful enough to challenge the landed aristocracy. The first parties
were thus representatives of the aristocratic landed interests and of the
growing urban middle class, respectively. This party development and
struggle could, however, find significant expression only where the middle
class had become strong enough to institute representative government.
England was the only important European state where this was achieved
before the middle of the eighteenth century. Here the kings drew their
support chiefly from the artistocratic landed groups, and revolution was
promoted mainly by the urban middle class. The former grew into the
Tories and the latter into the Whigs, this development taking place slowly
between 1640 and 1700.

When William III came to the throne of England after the Revolution
of 1688, English political parties were already a recognized element in
Parliamentary life. Something like strict partisanship in the consti-
tution of ministries came about with the rise of the cabinet system during
the reigns of George I and George II. George I, the founder of the
Hanoverian dynasty, was a German by birth and culture, and never
mastered either the English language or the English political system. He
was content to rule through ministers who assumed actual charge of the
political situation. He was fortunate in securing for his prime minister
the leading representative of the middle-class Whigs, Robert Walpole.
Walpole took all his ministers from the party that commanded the con-
fidence of Parliament. In this way, he built up the idea of the responsible
partisan ministry. Walpole ruled with wisdom and discretion, avoid-
ing foreign wars and entangling international relations. Under his long
leadership, England became gradually accustomed to the party system.

The next important stage in the development of the English party and
representative system came after the Reform Bill of 1832, which did away
with the rotten boroughs and widened the suffrage to some degree. After

234 PARTY GOVERNMENT

that time, when there was a clash between ministry and Parliament and
an appeal was taken to the constituencies, the ministry resigned if the
election went against it. In 1835, we have the first instance of a ministry
resigning because of a defeat in the general Parliamentary elections — the
Peel ministry. In this way, both the ministry and the House of Com-
mons were rendered responsible to the electorate.

The old division of Whigs and Tories began to break down after the
Reform Bill of 1832, and the Liberals and Conservatives took their place
before 1850. Their early battles turned about factory reform and free
trade. The Conservatives at first championed labor legislation, and
the Liberals the abolition of the Corn Laws (tariff on wheat) and other
such protective measures. During the last half of the century, the
Liberals became less rigidly laissez-faire and favored social legislation,
especially after 1905. The Conservatives were urged to do the same by
Joseph Chamberlain, but he met with indifferent success. Irish Home
Rule became a burning issue between the parties from 1884 to the first
World War. The Liberals favored it. During the last decade of the
nineteenth century the Labor party came into existence, and it assumed
an important role in English political life after 1906. It threw in its
weight with the Liberal party from 1905 to 1914 to forward social
legislation. Growing in strength, it has been in office twice since the
World War and recently seems to be regaining popularity. The first
World War hopelessly split the Liberal party, and British politics,
divided between various groups of Conservatives and Laborites, took
the trend towards the group party system that prevailed on the con-
tinent of Europe.

Party government on the continent of Europe passed through the same
general stages as did party government in England. The most notable
difference we have already touched upon, namely, the tendency of the
party system in continental Europe to develop on the lines of the group or
bloc system rather than the two-party type.

Before the adoption of our Constitution in 1789, the people of the
United States had enjoyed more than one hundred and fifty years of
practice in the organization of political institutions. Although there
was no widespread organization of parties until after the adoption of the
Constitution, political parties had existed from the beginning of settle-
ment in America. As John Adams said in 1812: "You say our divisions
began with Federalism and anti-Federalism? Alas! they began with
human nature; they have existed in America from its first plantation.
In every colony, divisions always prevailed. In New York, Pennsyl-
vania, Virginia, Massachusetts, and all the rest, a court and country
party has always contended."

The "Fathers" were familiar with the effects of parties, or better, "fac-
tions." They regarded party government as detrimental to public life,
and tried to guard against it in the new national government created by
the Constitution of 1787. They provided for an Electoral College to

PARTY GOVERNMENT 235

select the President, and apparently expected that this would operate
in a nonpartisan manner.

Yet the very system of government created by the Constitution was
one that strongly encouraged the origin and development of a party
system. There was a division of political authority and responsibility
between the federal and state governments. Moreover, following the
dictum of Montesquieu, there was a strict separation of the three phases
of governmental power in the federal government. The executive, legis-
lative, and judicial departments were, in formal theory at least, sharply
separated and balanced against each other. It was necessary to have
some organization that would produce unity of policy and action in state
and federal governments, and also unify the three formally separated
departments in the federal government, especially the executive and the
legislative. The political party was the agency that achieved this needed
unification. Finally, the new American government was one which in-
cluded a large number of important elective offices. Organization was
essential to provide candidates for these offices and to secure their elec-
tion. The party fulfilled this function as well.

Therefore, the party system arose not long after the establishment of
what the Fathers thought was a nonpartisan government. The Electoral
College virtually ceased to operate as an independent body by 1796,
and by 1800 it had already become a meaningless relic. Party develop-
ment thus took place speedily, in spite of President Washington's earnest
efforts to preserve the nonpartisan system contemplated by the framers
of the Constitution. Washington chose the members of his cabinet from
both parties, as English monarchs had done a hundred years before. The
legitimate function of an opposition party was not comprehended by
him. The party spirit of his administration and the bitterness of the
party recriminations, with those in his own official family employing
pamphleteers to attack political opponents, remind one of the party
strife during the reigns of William and Anne.

County and town nominating conventions had developed in the latter
part of the eighteenth century. When it became necessary to organize
state and national governments, some form of party organization of com-
parable scope was rendered essential. The legislative caucus, that is,
the nomination of party candidates by members of the legislatures, at
first supplied the need. The legislators were relatively prominent men
from all sections of the political community and fairly represented the
parties in the legislature. , Owing to the difficulty of travel in those days,
it was a great convenience to have a group of party men from all parta
of the state or country already assembled in some central place — the
capital city. The legislative caucus became, for a time, the natural
nominating convention and the one fairly permanent bit of party ma-
chinery. In its federal form this was known as the Congressional Caucus,
and it controlled the party nominations for the Presidency from 1804
to 1824, Because parties were at this time looked upon as extra-legal,

236 PARTY GOVERNMENT

with sinister potency — being in fact literally without standing in public
law — the central organization of the parties, the caucus, was naturally
severely criticized. It was hailed as "King Caucus," and the deposition
of this monarch was eagerly sought.

The destruction of the caucus system as a factor in national politics
was accomplished as a part of the democratic-frontier wave which brought
Andrew Jackson to the Presidency. Jackson believed himself at a dis-
advantage with the smooth and devious politicians who controlled the
caucus. Further, he and his followers were still enraged by the con-
tested election for the Presidency in 1824, for Jackson believed that he
had been cheated out of the election. He and his supporters began a
thoroughgoing attack upon the congressional control of the party nom-
inating system. By the time of the campaign of 1828 the congressional
Caucus had been undermined, and in 1832 the national nominating con-
vention had taken its place.

The first national nominating convention was held by the Anti-
Masonic party, which met in Baltimore in 1831 and nominated William
Wirt as its candidate for the Presidency. The Whigs met there later in
the year and nominated Clay, and the next year the Democrats followed
and nominated Jackson. An important revolution had been achieved,
and the party had grown, to some degree, beyond the outlaw stage. The
nominating convention soon supplanted the caucus in the local subdi-
visions of the country. Along with it came the development of per-
manent national, state, and county committees — political machines — to
look after party interests in the interval between the periodic nominating
conventions.

The political, or party, machine first developed on a large-scale in
American cities, especially those cities which had a large foreign-born
population, which could be easily manipulated. These machines not
only dominated city but state politics as well, and often exerted a large
influence on national party organization. Examples of such city ma-
chines have been Tammany Hall in New York, the Catholic-Democratic
machine in Boston, the Republican machine in Philadelphia, the Thomp-
soh and Kelly-Nash machines in Chicago, the Pendergast machine in
Kansas City and the Hague machine in Jersey City. Urban party
machines often promote graft and corruption. The large and unwieldy
city populations have made it difficult to get a united front for reform
and thus facilitated and perpetuated the corrupt party machines. The
machine continues to exist, even with a shift of party control.

The history of parties, as conventionally taught in the schools, is often
little more than a meaningless chronicling of the results of the quadrennial
presidential campaigns. Yet the history of parties in America, if properly
presented, furnishes an admirable reflection of the various phases of the
progress of American society. It is the basic purpose of government to
mediate between the various conflicting ideals and interests in society and
to adjust these conflicts, as well as possible, in the interest of public order
and progress, Parties have been the organization through which our

PARTY GOVERNMENT 237

major social interests have attempted to advance their causes. A study
of parties and their activity reveals the more important public issues
that have faced the country since the establishment of our national
government.

At the outset, the Federalists, under the leadership of Hamilton,
planned to reorganize the government after the chaos of the Confeder-
ation, restore order, establish a sound system of public and private
finance, assume the state debts, fund the national debt, and make it
possible for business to resume with confidence.

The program had the backing of the moneyed groups in the East, but
it aroused the opposition of the agrarian interests in the South and West,
which had little to gain from a revival of business and sound finances.
These did not feel that any important benefit would come from a redemp-
tion of the public securities and a funding of the public debt. In fact,
they would be the losers, for many of the farmers were debtors and most
of the certificates of indebtedness were held by the business clashes.
Further, they resented the greater burden of taxation put upon them by
Hamilton's constructive program. Especially was this true of states, like
Virginia, which had already paid off their state indebtedness. They found
their slogan in a strict construction of the Constitution, denying the
validity of Hamilton's contention for "implied powers/' They discovered
an astute leader in Thomas Jefferson.

As a result of fatal divisions within their ranks, and legislative indiscre-
tions— as in the case of the Alien and Sedition Laws — the Federalists were
weakened. In the party revolution of 1800, they were displaced by the
Democratic-Republicans. This Jeffersonian party soon accepted the con-
structive national policy of Hamilton, but put it on a more popular and
democratic foundation.

With the development of new problems in our national evolution,
appropriate parties arose to defend their diversified interests. The rem-
nants of the old Federalists and the more conservative Democratic-
Republicans developed into the National Republican or Whig party, of
which Clay and Webster were the spokesmen. They represented the
business and financial interests of the East and the more Rationalistic
element among the Middle-Westerners. They adopted for their program
national improvements in the way of building roads, canals, and railroads,
the fostering of manufactures, an increase of the tariff, according to the
so-called "American system," the maintenance of a United States Bank,
and the granting of loans to the West for sectional development.

The opposition party was called the Democratic party, and it chose for
its leader Andrew Jackson. The party members were, in part, a debtor
group, came to a large extent from the frontier, where sentiments and
practices of equality were the rule, and resented the power and arrogance
of the business and financial element of the East. They desired state
banks, so that they might supply their own credit and be free from the
economic control of the Easterners. The demand for the democratization
of the suffrage and the abolition of imprisonment for debt appeal&f

238 PARTY GOVERNMENT

especially to the lower classes, and led the eastern working-classes to join
hands with the frontiersmen in bearing Jackson to triumph in 1828.

Soon after Jackson 's period the issues that had confronted the parties in
the thirties were superseded by the struggle over slavery. The Whig
party became divided on the slavery issue and gradually disintegrated.
The Democratic party came more completely under the domination of the
slavery group, for which Calhoun was the spokesman, and the Jacksonian
philosophy lost its hold. The Democratic party became the party of the
"Slavocracy" of the South. It was joined by the pro-slavery Whigs.

Out of the disintegrating Whig party and the minor radical and anti-
slavery parties, the new Republican party was formed in 1856. It was at
first mainly a radical party, with its chief support, as in the case of the
early Democrats, in the laborers of the East and the frontiersmen of the
West. Coming into power in 1860, as the result of a fatal division of the
Democratic party, it was the party that won the Civil War and thus
gained the support of the banking and business classes, which had profited
by the war. It soon lost its radical traits and became the party of the
capitalistic conservatives. It supported the new banking plans, railroad
expansion and the land grants, retention of the high war tariff, the growth
of corporations, and the elimination of political interference with the
freedom of business enterprise. The Democratic party, freed from the
slavery octopus, became, for the time being, the minority party, support-
ing political reform and a more liberal policy in Southern reconstruction.

Neither major party has been consistently either progressive or reac-
tionary since 1865. While the Republicans have been more uniformly
conservative and the more dependable exponents of big business and the
protective tariff, they have at times shown signs of liberalism, as under
Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909. There has always been a
powerful liberal wing in the Republican party, which has been known
successively as Liberal Republican, Mugwump, and Progressive. The
Democratic party has wabbled from marked liberalism, as under Bryan
in 1896, Wilson in 1913, and Roosevelt in 1933, to extreme conservatism,
as under Parker in 1904, but it has inclined towards the moderate con-
servatism of the Cleveland type during most of the period since 1877.
Under Wilson, it ran the whole course from the liberalism of the "New
Freedom" to the ultra-reactionary orgy after 1918, during which the
country was all but ruled by Attorney-General Palmer and the Depart-
ment of Justice.

There is no longer any fundamental division between the two old parties
over the basic institutions of society. In 1800, the parties represented
mercantile versus agricultural interests. In 1850, the southern Slavoc-
racy was lined up against northern manufacturing and commercial groups
and frontier agricultural interests. In 1896, it was a division between the
plutocracy and the progressive agrarian and labor interests. But, since
1900, both great parties have wholeheartedly supported the capital-
istic system. Even Mr. Roosevelt, in 1933, deliberately and exclusively
sought to patch up the capitalistic system. The campaign of 1940 was

PARTY GOVERNMENT 239

probably the greatest sham in American party history. There was no
opportunity for the voters to decide upon the most burning issue of the
day — that of American attitude towards the second World War. It was
observed that Mr. Willkie seemed to be "campaigning for a seat in the
Roosevelt cabinet " rather than for the Presidency. Our entry into the
second World War makes it possible that we may adopt the one-party
system of totalitarian states.

The more extreme liberals and some radicals have tended to be skeptical
of gaining their ends in either great party and have persistently organized
radical minor parties, such as the Granger movement, the Greenback
party, the Populist party, the Non-Partisan League (really a party) , the
Socialist and Socialist-Labor parties, and, most recently the Farmer-
Labor party and the Communist party. In one way these parties have
been successful. They have forced the major parties to embody many of
the progressive proposals in their platforms.

Any logical party alignment in this country, at present, would probably
call for a clean sweep of the two old parties and for the amalgamation
of the conservative and liberal elements respectively into two new parties.
This would probably have happened long before this, had party organi-
zation been as fluid and undeveloped as in 1830. But so powerful has
the party machinery become that the party issues are now subordinated
to party machinery. The means — party machinery — have been con-
verted into the end. The two major parties today have so much un-
reality and so few real differences because they exist chiefly to obtain the
elective offices and the economic power that comes from being in control.
The revolt of reactionary Democrats against the New Deal, particularly
against Mr. Roosevelt's plan for reorganizing the Supreme Court in 1937,
has suggested to some that we may be on the eve of a rational reorganiza-
tion of the American party system. In his Jackson Day Speech, on
January 8th, 1938, President Roosevelt threw down the gauntlet to reac-
tionary renegades in his own party, and made an appeal to all types of
liberals to rally about him. At the same time, reactionary Republican
leaders have beckoned the conservative Democrats into their ranks. It
is too early as yet to say what may be accomplished, but these rumblings
may be symptomatic of more far-reaching changes just over the horizon.
The second World War may, of course, bring to an end representative
government and the party system, in the United States as well as the Old
World.

Outstanding Problems of Party Government

In spite of the indispensable nature of the political party in representa-
tive government and democracy, it inevitably developed by-products
which created serious abuses. Many of these abuses are inherent in party
government. Others are the blunders inevitable in the first stages of
experimentation with any procedure.

Among the difficulties and abuses which seem to be inseparably asso-

240 PARTY GOVERNMENT

ciated with political parties is their tendency to become oligarchical in
organization and to oppose the popular will in the democracies they are
supposed to serve. Franklin H. Giddings suggested that this is the result
of the inevitable proclivity of the few to dominate in all social organiza-
tion and activity. He finds that some react to new issues and oppor-
tunities much more readily than others and, by their alertness and
resourcefulness, dominate social situations and activities:

Not all individuals react to a given stimulation with equal promptness, or
completeness, or persistence. Therefore, in every situation there are individuals
that react more effectively than others do. They reinforce the original stimula-
tion and play a major part in interstimulation. They initiate and take respon-
sibility. They lead: they conduct experiments in a more or less systematic
fashion.

Those individuals that react most effectively command the situation and create
new situations to which other individuals must adjust themselves. Few or many,
the alert and effective are a protocracy : a dominating plurum from which ruling
classes are derived. Protocracy is always with us. We let George do it, and
George to a greater or less extent "does" us.4

Every kleptocracy of brigands and conquerors, every plutocracy, every aristoc-
racy, and every democracy begins as a protocracy. It comes into existence and
begins its career as a little band of alert and capable persons who see the situation,
grasp the opportunity, and in the expressive slang of our modern competitive life,
"go to it" with no unnecessary delay.

We have now arrived at the first induction, the fundamental principle of politi-
cal Science, which is, namely: The few always dominate.

Invariably, the few rule, more or less arbitrarily, more or less drastically, more
or less extensively. Democracy, even the most radical democracy, is only that
state of politically organized mankind in which the rule of the few is least arbi-
trary and most responsible, least drastic and most considerate.5

A number of social psychologists have suggested explanations for the
oligarchical tendency in parties. Sighele, LeBon, Tarde, Durkheim, and
Ross have held that it is due to the prevalence of crowd psychology in
modern political assemblies and even in states as a whole. Psychic con-
tagion is promoted by the press and other modern agencies for expediting
the communication of information and the creation of uniform emotional
states. Under these circumstances, the leaders can usually manipulate
the masses at will. Contemporary propaganda has facilitated this de-
moralizing trend.6

Robert Michels, in his book, Political Parties 7 finds that oligarchical
tendencies are inevitable in any form of political organization, even
though it be that extreme form of revolutionary decentralization known
as Syndicalism. He finds the average individual stupid, and lacking in
initiative and resourcefulness. The more alert and intelligent persons
naturally come to the top as leaders. But the psychological consequences

4 Giddings, "Pluralistic Behavior," American Journal of Sociology, March, 1920,
p. 539.

5 Giddings, The Responsible State, Houghton, Mifflin, 1918, pp. 19-20.

6 See below, pp. 545 ff.

7 Hearst's International Library, 1915.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 241

for the leaders are all too often vanity, arrogance, and a tendency to forget
that they owe their position to popular consent.

Under modern conditions, democracy, in a broad sense, is mass rule.
But masses are incoherent and inarticulate; they must have leaders.
Further, the masses cannot participate directly in government; they must
choose representatives, and representative government requires party
organization. Since the masses are subject to mob psychology, they are
easily manipulated in elections. Modern parliaments, made up of chosen
representatives, operate under psychological conditions very similar to
those of the crowd. They are so large and unwieldy that they inevitably
come under the domination of the able minority.

The main cause of oligarchy in political parties comes, therefore, from
the necessity of organization. The inevitable organization which a politi-
cal party must create to function effectively produces the necessity of
leadership. The consequent oligarchy then defeats the democracy that
originally called forth party organization.8

First among the abuses of the modern party is the tyrannical dominion
of the boss and the machine. A general and popular superstition in re-
gard to the American government is that the individual citizen is able to
advance his interests and make his opinion felt in governmental matters.
In other words, the government is supposed to be directly representative
of the mass of citizens.

Those who have made even an elementary study of the processes of
American government in the last fifty years know that this conception is
only a pious aspiration. It has been very difficult for any citizen or any
small group of public-spirited citizens directly to exert effective pressure
upon any governmental organization. Legislation can usually be secured
only through advance negotiations with, and approval by, the boss and
the machine. Instead of direct government, we have built what has been
frequently called the "invisible 'government/' which controls most phases
of American political life. Elihu Root once said that, for nearly a gener-
ation, the government of the Empire State was not located at Albany but
in the private offices of Boss Thomas C. Platt, of the United States Express
Company, in New York City.9

Down to a couple of generations ago, voting was not secret. It was
possible for a boss or his representative to know how every citizen voted.
This made it easy for the employer of a voter or for representatives of the
political machine to intimidate the citizen and thus control his vote.

Again, the party machine has controlled the selection of delegates to the
nominating conventions. There the delegates themselves have had rela-
tively little part in the choice of candidates, who are normally selected
beforehand by a narrow clique of the more powerful members of the
machine. The people are then given the opportunity to reject or ratify

s Mickels, op. cit., pp. 21-22, 26-27, 31-35, 130, 135, 230, 401, 405.
9 Platt was the Republican boss of New York State.

242 PARTY GOVERNMENT

these candidates. Thus, political officers, who theoretically owe their
position to popular election, are actually chosen by the machine.

The nomination of Warren G. Harding in 1920 was one of the most
flagrant examples of the undemocratic nature of convention nominations.
At the time, Mr. Harding was known only as a strictly regular Republican
Senator, above the average in appearance and bearing. He made a
miserable showing in the preconvention primaries, and even his own cam-
paign manager was not elected to the Chicago convention. The weather
was unbearably hot in Chicago at the time, the beer supply was low, and
there was a long deadlock between Johnson, Lowden, and Wood. The
delegates were disconsolate at the thought of another week-end in the city.
The leaders of the plutocrats at the convention saw their chance to exploit
the desire of the delegates to get away from Chicago, and to slip in a
candidate who would be most plastic in their hands, if elected to the
Presidency. Harding seemed to be their man, as he was known to be
wholly safe and complaisant, and his physiognomy seemed a most promis-
ing decoration for the campaign posters. Hence Myron T. Herrick,
George Harvey, and a half-dozen others railroaded him through the con-
vention. He was in no sense whatever the choice of the people. Had
there been a popular plebiscite throughout the United States on the eve of
that Chicago convention, it is doubtful if Harding would have 'received
100,000 votes. He was nominated, and over 15,500,000 surged forward
in November to place their stamp of approval upon him. The man
whom the great majority of the people desired to see nominated for the
Presidency, Mr. Herbert Hoover, was not seriously considered by the
convention.

Not only do the boss and the machine control voting and nominations ;
they also control much of the legislation. Even if the machine graciously
allows a citizen or a group of citizens to introduce a bill it stands no
chance of being favorably reported out of committee and passed unless
the party leaders approve. In many cases, bills not approved by the
party machine are not even introduced. Legislation is mainly a matter
secretly and effectively arranged between the favored groups and classes
on the one hand, and the party machine on the other.

We are not charging any special diabolism to American capitalism in
relation to politics. Jefferson and the agrarians were politically as un-
scrupulous in their day, and if a society were dominated by the proletariat
we would certainly witness a most faithful continuance of much the same
political methods that they now so warmly criticize. It merely happens
that since 1865 we have been controlled mainly by the business and
financial classes. In some instances, where the labor groups possessed an
unusual degree of power, they also exerted the same pressures upon legis-
lation that had been used by the representatives of capitalistic interests.

What we are concerned with is the fact that, during the last fifty years,
popular wishes have had little to do with the major part of the important
legislation passed in our federal and state governments. The plutocracy
have blandly used their power to embody their wishes and objectives in

PARTY GOVERNMENT 243

legislation.10 They have then utilized a generally willing press to con-
vince the populace that such laws and policies were not only what the
people really needed, but were also exactly what the mass of people
actually desired. In most cases, the press was very successful in execut-
ing this deception down to 1936.

The only important limitation upon unlimited government by the vested
interests and the machine, at least down to 1920, was that this collusion
could not be carried too far without leading to popular indignation and
the development of a revolt against it. Such rebellion has appeared in
the Liberal Republican movement, the Mugwump secession, Bryan
Democracy, the Roosevelt Progressivism of 1912, the repudiation of
Wilsonism and Palmerism in 1920, and the Farmer-Labor revolt of 1924.
For the most part, however, the "interests" and the politicians have been
able to deceive and reassure the public, and the revolts against plutocratic
control have not been frequent or successful. The failure to repudiate
Coolidge and the Republican party, in 1924, after the oil and Veterans*
Bureau scandals illustrates the docility or cynicism of the public in the
face of the gravest political abuses.

As their reward for keeping the government in line with the interests
of the dominant economic groups, the boss and the machine have been
granted all sorts of gross and petty graft. The "spoils system" has
become something far more diversified, ingenious, and remunerative than
it was in its primitive days under Andrew Jackson. Favorable contracts
on government works, the spoils of appointive offices, "pork-barrel" legis-
lation, and other types of rewards have been handed over to the boss for
his efficient services in keeping the populace and the party subservient.

With the growth of the population and the increased necessity for
partisan alertness, the expenses that have been connected with successful
party organization and political campaigns have endrmously increased.11
Vast sums of money have been spent to secure the nomination of favored
candidates, and political leaders have demanded large contributions from
the powerful economic interests which expect to profit by the election of
their candidates.

This practice first became notorious in the Republican campaign of
1896, when Mark Hanna raised vast sums from Wall Street in order to
secure the election of Major McKinley and defeat what was believed to
be the revolutionary program of William Jennings Bryan. It had cost
only $250,000 to elect Abraham Lincoln, but Hanna is said to have col-
lected in all some $3,350,000. This was far the largest sum ever expended
in behalf of a single candidate down to that time. It was probably a
good bargain for the economic interests that were faithfully shielded by
McKinley's administration, though the advantages were in part lost
by the succession of the more liberal Theodore Roosevelt after McKinley's

10 Cf. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons, Harcourt, Brace, 1935; The
President-Makers, Harcourt, Brace, 1940; and Ferdinand Lundberg, America's Sixty
Families, Vanguard, 1937.

" See E. B. Logan, Ed., The American Political Scene, Harper, 1938, Chap. V.

244 PARTY GOVERNMENT

assassination in 1901. The Democrats spent only $700,000 on Bryan.
The amount of money spent for the election of McKinley was extraor-
dinary at the time and was not exceeded until 1920. Campaign ex-
penses in the last thirty years have increased enormously in comparison
with those before 1896. In 1916, the Republican party spent $3,500,000,
altogether, in trying to elect Hughes, and has not spent less on its presi-
dential candidate since that time. It spent $7,265,000 on Harding in
1920. The Democrats spent $2,300,000 for Cox. In the campaign of
1928, about $16,600,000 was expended by national and state committees —
some $9,433,600 for Hoover and $7,152,500 for Smith. The following
table gives the expenditures of the national committees of the Republican
and Democratic parties, alone, since 1896 in the presidential campaigns:

Year Republican Democratic

1896 $3,350,000 $ 675,000

1900 3,000,000 425,000

1904 1,900,000 • 700,000

1908 1,655,000 619,000

1912 1,076,000 1,134,000

1916 2,441,000 2,284,000

1920 5,417,000 1,470,000

1924 4,020,000 1,108,000

1928 6,256,000 5,342,000

1932 2,900,000 2,245,000

1936 8,892,000 5,194,000

1940 2,242,000 2,438,000

These sums are only a part of the total campaign expenditures. The
total Republican expenditures in the campaign of 1920 were $7,265,000,
as compared with the $5,417,000 spent by the national committee. The
Republicans and Democrats, together, spent between 18 and 20 million
dollars in the campaign of 1940. Most of this money is contributed by
individuals and interests that expect favors or protection. Five powerful
interests — Standard Oil, Guggenheim, steel, automobiles, and public
utilities — contributed approximately $1,000,000 to the Hoover chest in
1928. Some 239 individuals gave over $2,500,000 to the Hoover cause;
<5ne Republican contributed $175,000. Three Democrats each gave more
than $100,000 to the Smith fund. In 1928, a new method of campaigning
— radio addresses — was developed. The Republicans spent $600,000 in
this way, and the Democrats $500,000.

Congressional elections also often involve colossal campaign expendi-
tures. One senatorial candidate spent over 2 million dollars for his
nomination and election. Since the first World War, 3 would-be Senators
have been challenged by the Senate and refused seats because of excessive
expenditures for nomination and election.12

Recently there has been a deplorable development of excessive expendi-
tures in the effort to secure nominations for office, particularly the

12 Truman H. Newberry of Michigan in 1918; Frank L. Smith of Illinois in 1926;
and William S. Vare of Pennsylvania in 1926.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 245

•nomination for the Presidency. Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for
nomination in 1912 cost $750,000, and in the period preceding the
Republican convention of 1920 so much money was expended by candi-
dates in the struggle for delegates that two of the most prominent
candidates were practically disqualified by the revelation of their expendi-
tures. The unsuccessful campaign of Leonard Wood for nomination at
this time cost $1,775,000. Frank 0. Lowden's expenses at the same
time were $415,000. The Newberry, Smith, and Vare cases involved
heavy nomination, as well as election, expenses. The direct primary has
been, in part, responsible for this large increase. It costs more to secure
the support of the many who vote in primaries than it did to control the
few in caucuses and conventions. In states like Pennsylvania, that have
been preponderantly one-party states, the nomination has been tanta-
mount to election. Hence it is logical that more money be spent in the
primaries than in the formal election campaign. About $1,500,000 was
spent in the Republican senatorial primary in Pennsylvania in 1938.

Not only has there been a scandalous use of money in campaigns for
nomination and election to public office. There has been much overt
fraud and intimidation. Voters of minority parties are often kept away
from the polls by violence. Repeaters cast many ballots each for the
candidates favored by the dominant machine. Ballots are fraudulently
counted. It has been a persistent belief that Mr. Bryan was cheated out
of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes in the campaign of
1896 through fraudulent counts in centers controlled by the desperate
big-business forces. Intimidation and fraud at the polls have become
especially prevalent in the last fifteen years with the rise of racketeering
and gangdom and their affiliations with dominant political machines.
Our election laws are archaic and provide inadequate protection to insure
fair elections, even when enforced:

Every investigation or election contest brings to light glaring irregularities,
errors, misconduct on the part of precinct officers, disregard of election laws and
instuctions, slipshod practices, and downright frauds. The entire country has
been shocked from time to time by the revelation of wholesale election frauds
in some of our large cities. Competent political observers report that election
frauds are by no means confined to these few cities, but are widely prevalent in
less populous communities. Even these election scandals and the slipshod ad-
ministration revealed by election recounts do not indicate the real state of affairs
which prevails generally in election administration. The truth of the matter
is that the whole administration — organizations, laws, methods and procedures,
and records — are, for most states, quite obsolete. The whole system, including
the election laws, requires a thorough revision and improvement.13

The machine and party organization, which are supposed to be a means
for advancing the party program, have become ends in themselves. From
the campaign of 1904 to the New Deal the Republican and Democratic
parties rarely took a fundamentally divergent stand upon the more

13 J. P. Harris, Election Administration in the United States, Brookings Institu-
tion, 1934, p. 1.

246 PARTY GOVERNMENT

significant public issues. The main goal of both parties has been the
protection of vested economic interests and the spoils of office. An effort
has been made to keep the party machinery intact, and to discourage any
insurgent movement that might wreck one of the grand old parties and
substitute a new party with an independent party program.

For over twenty-five years the citizen could decide only between party
machines. He was not permitted to choose between two fundamentally
different programs of public policy. The election of 1912 offered some
exception, but even this demonstrated the power of the machine. The
most popular figure in American political life at the time with the most
attractive party program since the original platform of the Republican
party of 1856, was unable to carry through a revolt against the reac-
tionary machine. The power of the machine was demonstrated by its
ability to exclude from the Republican nomination the man who was
certainly the choice of the great majority of the Republican voters.

Since the majority react to propositions in a fundamentally emotional
manner, party symbols, party shibboleths, and campaign catchwords —
such as "the bloody shirt," "the full dinner pail," "the new freedom,"
"the abundant life," references to "the grand old party" and to distin-
guished men who have led the party in the past — are relied upon to hold
the voters in line and secure their allegiance, even though they know
nothing of the platform of the party, and would be likely to disapprove
if it were made clear.

Those who fight against the corruption and inefficiency in our political
life find the strength of the party symbolism and phraseology an almost
insuperable obstacle. To the average American audience, the flashing
upon the screen of the elephant, the donkey, the pictures of Jefferson,
Lincoln, the Roosevelts, arouses more instant response and approval than
the most carefully prepared and informing political speech imaginable.
Particularly significant is the fact that during the political campaign,
the period in which the voter should employ the greatest rationality, he
is most at the mercy of the emotions provoked by party strife. The
partisanship that is a mild aberration between campaigns becomes in-
flated during the campaign periods into what is often downright hysteria
and a paralysis of rational judgment — a campaign psychosis.

A fundamental problem in party government goes to the very heart
of representative institutions. The old territorial units of representation
are proving ever more inadequate to meet the problems of our com-
plicated industrial civilization. Outside of purely rural districts, a con-
stituency is made up of a great diversity of social and economic classes
and group interests. No man can truly "represent" them all, or any
considerable proportion. If, as is usually the case, he represents a few
of the stronger interests in his constituency, he dare not do so too openly,
lest he incur the displeasure of the others and risk defeat at the next
election. As a result of this situation, an extra-legal type of representa-
tion has arisen in the powerful and complicated lobby that has grown
up in the national capital and in most state capitals. Here the repre-

PARTY GOVERNMENT 247

sentatives of the dominant interests — bankers, industrialists, exporters,
farmers, war veterans, labor leaders, and racketeers — assemble and deal
directly with legislators. They try to secure the passage of favorable
laws and kill restrictive legislation. So powerful has this national lobby
become that E. P. Herring has described it as a "third house of Con-
gress." 14 It is more important than the House or the Senate. This
development may be inevitable*, but it is a challenge to the existing type
of representative government and to our party system:

In place of nations of individuals, all more or less alike in respect to conditions
and ideas, the Industrial Revolution has given us nations differentiated into
classes and corporate and occupational groups, more or less different and often
sharply antagonistic, in which lines of division have little or nothing to do with
the territorial areas on which political representation is based. The government,
nominally composed of persons chosen to represent the will of the people in
certain territorial areas, finds that the crucial problems of the time, which are
essentially economic, cannot be solved without taking into account the will of
the people grouped in certain economic categories. Such is doubtless the real
source of the diminished state of Deputies and Congressmen. What they too
often legally represent is a group of people without any definite common will
to be expressed; what they have to deal with are groups of people (and not labor
groups only) who can get their will expressed only, or much better, by using
their extra-legal power as a means of dictation.15

In a stimulating book A. N. Holcombe predicts the end of the old rustic
American party system based upon sections, and the rise of a new party
alignment founded directly and openly upon class interests. The grow-
ing importance of the city in American life will, he believes, render such
a transformation necessary:

The passing of the frontier and the growth of urban industry have shaken the
foundations of the old party system in national politics. The old sectional in-
terests are changing and the old sectional alliances are breaking down. The old
party politics is visibly passing away. The character of the new party politics
will be determined cjiiefly by the interests and attitudes of the urban population.
It will be less rustic than the old and more urbane. There will be less sectional
politics and more class politics. That the old rustic sectional politics is passing
is easy to demonstrate. What the new urbane class politics will be like and how
it may be made most serviceable to the people of the United States are more
difficult questions.18

Another important issue in representative government is raised by the
exponents of proportional representation. They point out the injustice
of leaving the defeated party with no representation whatever. They
contend that sound and equitable representative government must give
the parties representation in proportion to their strength. They hold that
it is unfair to give one party or group 100 per cent of the representation

14 E. P. Herring, Group Representation before Congress, Johns Hopkins Press,
1929.

15 C. L. Becker, "Lord Brycc on Modern Democracies/' Political Science Quarterly,
Academy of Political Science, December, 1921, pp. 674-675.

10 Holcombe, The New Party Politics, Norton, 1933, pp. 1-2, and Chap. I, passim.

248 PARTY GOVERNMENT

when it may have won the election in a given district by a majority of
only one per cent of the votes. Yet it must be remembered that pro-
portional representation would probably increase the number of parties
in legislatures, thus encouraging the bloc system with its complexities.

Corruption and Extravagance Under Party Government

The irritation associated with the annual task of making our federal
and state income-tax returns and submitting to the even more distressing
indignities of local assessors and tax-collectors has led many thrifty
citizens to consider more seriously the reasons for the ever greater
expenditures involved in the maintenance of public agencies.

For the decade from 1791 to 1800, the total federal expenditures of our
government were $68,256,000, which constituted an expenditure per indi-
vidual, on the basis of the census of 1800, of approximately $13. In
the decade from 1911 to 1920 the federal expenditures for the ten-year
period had increased to $425 per head. For the year 1934 alone the
federal expenditures were over $56 per individual, or more than four
times the expenditures per individual during the whole first decade of
our national history. In 1937 the annual per capita expenditures of the
federal government stood at $62.69, and in 1940 they were $73.16.

In this discussion we do not assume that democracy is necessarily
accompanied by more graft and corruption than all other forms of govern-
ment. The most relevant fact in the contrast between democracy and
autocracy is that as one contemporary writer has expressed it, democracy
inevitably brings more "snouts to the trough" than any other leading
form of government.

The ever-increasing costs of government are, however, to no small
degree produced by the enormous complexity of the social problems that
have arisen in the last hundred and fifty years. The growing number
of practical problems that must be handled by governmental agencies
has resulted in an ever greater state intervention in social, economic, and
cultural activities. Many writers have attributed this extension of gov-
ernmental activity primarily to the growing popularity of bureaucracy
and state-socialistic doctrines. To a very large degree, however, such
"state socialism" has only been the practical acceptance of the actual
responsibilities forced upon society by scientific, technological, and eco-
nomic revolutions. Wars, also, have become much more expensive, and
so have the armaments preparatory to wars. There is much sumptuary
legislation, like our late Prohibition laws, that is either useless or harmful
and calls for needless expenditures to maintain the officials who execute it.
But, after making due allowance for such excesses, the fact remains that
the social changes of the last century have inevitably made necessary a
remarkable increase in the scope and expense of government activities.

During the first ten years of our national history we spent through the
federal government only $68,256,000. The appropriations for the fiscal
year of 1932 ran to the staggering sum of $4,674,073,917. "The New

PARTY GOVERNMENT 249

Deal" more than doubled these expenditures before the defense and war
periods. The total expenditures for the fiscal year 1933-34 included
ordinary expenditures of $3,100,914,000; extraordinary expenditures of
$4,004,135,000, and a budget deficit of $3,989,496,000. In 1937, federal
expenditures totalled $8,105,158,547. In 1940, they were $9,666,085,000,
with total appropriations of $13,351,786,000. Even the recently founded
Department of Commerce uses up about as much in one year as was
required to run our whole federal government for a decade in the days
of Washington. The annual appropriation for the District of Columbia
alone is over seven times the annual budget for the federal government
in Washington's administration.

The percentage of the total income of the population of the United
States which goes into governmental expenditures — federal, state, and
local — has increased amazingly since 1913. In that year governmental
expenditures, some 3 billion dollars, amounted to 8 per cent of our total
national (not governmental) income. By 1932 they had mounted to 31
per cent, when they stood at $13,470,000,000. Governmental costs have
increased markedly since 1932, owing in part to the increasing expendi-
tures for the relief of the unemployed. They were $15,500,000,000 in
1934. By 1938, total government costs were estimated to be $18,000,-
000,000. The second World War greatly raised government expenditures.
The appropriations for 1942 exceeded seventy billion dollars for the
federal government alone. The graph on page 250 is a composite picture
of the increases in federal expenditures, the types of expenditures in-
volved, and the sources of government revenue.

An important source of mounting expenditures in the federal govern-
ment is the increase in federal job-holders. This is usually associated,
in particular, with democratic institutions and practices, though in all
probability the increase of federal employees has been brought about to
no small degree by the inevitable growth of state intervention in various
aspects of social problems. In 1816, there were about 6,000 in the
classified and unclassified federal positions. By 1861, they had increased
to about 50,000. By 1890, the number had more than trebled, reaching
166,000. By 1916, the year before we entered the first World War, the
federal civilian positions numbered 438,000. In 1918, the war increased
these to some 917,760. By 1922, there was a shrinkage that brought the
number down to 560,863; but, in 1932, the number had risen to 732,460.
The salaries amounted to $1,055,970,000. The total number of persons
on the federal payroll in 1932, both civil and military, amounted to
1,032,688. Their salaries ran up to $1,341,670,431. In October, 1934,
the federal civilian employees in the executive branches alone totaled
680,181 and their salaries in this month amounted to $101,888,573. In
June, 1937, the number stood at 841,664. In July, 1940, they had passed
the million mark — or 1,011,666. The second World War greatly in-
creased this figure. In April, 1941, there were some 1,264,000 non-
military federal employees. The graph on page 251 indicates the vast
expansion of the federal bureaucracy since 1910.

WHERE THE MONEY COMES FROM

3

All Other Taxes

Payroll Taxes

Agricultural Adjustment Taxes

Foreign Obligations

Customs

Misc. fnternal Revenue

Income Taxes

4«

I'M II !>>> ill

1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1936 1939 1940

'5

WHERE THE MONEY GOES TO

D*bt Retirement

loans- and Subscriptions
to Stock*, etc.

Unemptoymcnt Relief
Public Works
Bonus Prepayment
Ordinary Expenditures

19291930 J93I 1932 J933 1934 1935 »936 »937 1938 IP39 »S>40

Courtesy of The New York Times.

250

PARTY GOVERNMENT

251

[A THIRTY-YEAR RECORD OP FEDERAL CIViLIAN

1000

A BREAKDOWN OF FEDERAL CIVILIAN EMPLOYE/ IN 1940

TOTAL- I,OII,O66

44% I 23% | 16% | 10% 1 7%

CLERICAL
Each symbol representr 57, oP total

1

[TRADE AN& MANUAL |PROF_E//J:

AND

AbMINIXTRATIVE

Courtesy of The New York Times.

When these figures are extended to include those holding state, munic-
ipal, and local positions, they become even more impressive. Between
1870 and 1932 the number of persons in public service in the United States
increased by 1,000 per cent. Even before the New Deal went into
operation and produced an unprecedented number of people getting pay
from the federal, state, and local governments, there were over 2%
millions on all public payrolls. They received 4 billion dollars in salaries
and wages — some 63 per cent of all tax money collected. In April, 1941,
there were 6,100,000 in the employ of the federal, state, and local govern-
ments. This was a little less than one out of every eight of the total num-
ber of workers employed in the country. Their total remuneration in this
month was 667 million dollars, or about 8 billion dollars for the year at

252 PARTY GOVERNMENT

this rate. Of the federal workers, 1,532,000 were in the military service
and 1,264,000 in nonmilitary branches. Some 3,300,000 were in the em-
ploy of the state and local governments. The great cost of this govern-
mental service makes it desirable that competent and honest persons be
employed, so that the public can get its money's worth.

The slowly established federal civil-service system, which was intro-
duced in a feeble fashion in 1883 and has been gradually extended and
strengthened since that time, docs not notably reduce the graft and
expense connected with federal offices. It is designed to secure greater
efficiency among those who are actually chosen for federal jobs. In one
sense, the civil-service system doubtless helps to increase the actual
number of federal employees, in that it makes it more difficult to dis-
continue an obsolete or unnecessary branch of the service and to discharge
supposedly faithful employees.

Most criticisms of 9 our increasing federal expenditures attribute the
increase primarily to the extravagance of Congressmen, petty waste, and
the growth of state-socialistic enterprises. This attitude dominates the
late James M. Beck's Our Wonderland of Bureaucracy. But such critics
overlook what is far and away the chief source of public waste and
mounting expenditures, namely, wars and vast armaments — expenditures
which men like Mr. Beck have been the first to support with great enthu-
siasm. We may have an expensive civil-service bureaucracy and may
waste large sums in petty graft and extravagance, but all this is "pin-
money," compared to the large and often unnecessary expenditures for
war purposes. Moreover, it is well established that our civil servants are,
for the most part, underpaid.

From a tabular exhibit of our federal expenditures in 1930, it may be
seen that in a normal peace year war accounted for nearly 70 per cent of
our federal outlay. Military and naval expenditures ran to 38.5 per cent;
and interest and retirement on the national debt, due chiefly to the cost
of past wars, to 30.4 per cent. This brings the total up to 68.8 per cent.
Payments to veterans are mounting each year. It is inevitable that the
vast expenditures for the second World War will greatly increase the
proportion of the budget going into military expenses, even in the years
after the war is over. Since July, 1940, Congress has voted for defense
and war some 160 billion dollars, a sum equal to twelve times the total
expenditures for relief and social aid by the federal, state, and local gov-
ernments from 1933 to 1940.

The governmental expenditures have also increased in state and local
units in the last generation, though not in such dramatic fashion as in
the federal government. In 1913 the total expenditures of the state
governments amounted to $388,000,000. In 1932, they equaled $2,322,-
000,000. In 1939, they stood at $3,464,000,000. In 1913, the expendi-
tures of local government units totaled $1,844,000,000. By 1932, they had
increased to $6,906,000,000.19 However, much of the increase in 1932 was

10 Another estimate puts this as high as $8,292,000,000.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 253

due to the heavy relief expenditures of the years after the depression of
1929.

In England, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is compelled to determine
the expenditures for the coming year and the various sources of revenue
that will cover the proposed expenditures. If the revenues greatly exceed
or fall conspicuously beneath the expenditures, the Chancellor is regarded
as manifestly unfit for his post. In the United States, however, there has
been less scientific coordination of effort in determining federal expen-
ditures and providing for the appropriations to meet them than we find
in England.

Down to the time of the passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of
1921, the procedure in determining federal revenues and expenditures was
essentially the following: In October, the heads of the cabinet depart-
ments sent to the Secretary of the Treasury their estimate for the expen-
ditures for the ensuing year. These departments invariably asked for
more than they needed, because they naturally feared that their requests
would be pruned by congressional committees. The Secretary of the
Treasury had, however, no real power to reduce these estimates. While
the executive department heads were, in this way, submitting their esti-
mates to the Secretary of the Treasury, the committees in the House of
Representatives in control of the various types of appropriations prepared
their estimates, largely based on the expenditures of the previous year.
Often there was no cooperation between the cabinet heads and the Secre-
tary of the Treasury, on the one hand, and the House committees on
expenditure, on the other.

Even more striking is the fact that neither of these groups was very
effectively coordinated with the House committee on revenue (the Com-
mittee on Ways and Means). There was opportunity for informal
collaboration, but the Committee on Ways and Means could work
independently of the Committees on appropriations and the executive
departments, with the result that far too much or too little revenue might
be raised in any particular year. If the revenues contemplated by the
Committee on Ways and Means were not adequate to meet the federal
expenditures, the President, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the
Comptroller had the authority to decide what should be allotted to each
department. This had to be done within the limitations imposed by the
existence of specific departments. The unscientific and incoherent nature
of such a financial system is obvious.

Much enthusiasm was generated by the passage, in 1921, of the Budget
and Accounting Act. Many were led to suppose that it provided fox;
something resembling the highly scientific English budget system. Noth-
ing could be further from the truth. About all that the bill actually
achieved was officially to invite and stimulate what had been possible
before, namely, direct presidential scrutiny and leadership in the prepa-
ration of the estimated executive expenditures for the fiscal year.

The President is required to lay before Congress at the opening of
each regular session a composite budget, setting forth the revenues and

254 PARTY GOVERNMENT

expenditures of the previous year and those suggested for the coming
fiscal year. The specific information required is furnished to the Presi-
dent by the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, who is supposed to
gather his information from the various executive departments and other
disbursing agencies. In no way does the President or any cabinet official,
such as the Secretary of the Treasury, have the authority to introduce
bills to authorize these expenditures or to indicate the specific basis for
raising the revenue required. The committees on appropriations can
ignore the President's recommendations, and the Committee on Ways and
Means is not in any way legally required to respect the proposals of
either the President, the Treasury, or the committees on appropriations.

Therefore, our present budget system, as compared with the English
plan and procedure, is no budget system at all. The direct and com-
pulsory coordination of executive and legislative activity, which charac-
terizes the English system, is almost entirely absent. Such a confused
and uncoordinated system of controlling receipts and expenditures is al-
most perfectly adapted to fostering every sort of partisan, sectional, and
class graft. While various phases of New Deal legislation, such as the
Administrative Reorganization Act, have added improvements, we are
still far from a scientific budget system like that of Britain. Our budget
scheme does not, in any sense, provide for effective control or reduction
of the pork barrel and the omnibus bill, the two conspicuous and ingenious
techniques for raiding the federal treasury. Charles Austin Beard con-
cludes that "in actual practice, the first test of the new budget system . . .
worked a number of economies, but it did not materially reduce the
amount of logrolling or the size of the 'pork-barrel.' " As A. E. Buck
summarizes the matter: "While the development of the budget in the
United States has made considerable progress in the last two or three
decades, it has as yet scarcely passed beyond the initial stages."

The term "pork barrel" orginated from a usage on the Southern slave
plantations. Salt pork was given out to the slaves at intervals and the
usual method of distribution was to smash a large barrel that contained
pork and allow the slaves to crowd up and seize as much as they could
for themselves. The haste of the Congressmen to include appropriations
for their own localities in the general appropriation bill led cynical
observers to designate the practice as "the pork barrel," and the name
has clung persistently.

The omnibus bill simply means the abandonment of the practice of
passing specific appropriations for particular purposes and definite
localities, and the substitution of the practice of lumping together, in a
single bill, the appropriations of a roughly similar type for the country
at large.

In the old days, when appropriation bills were introduced for specific
purposes in a particular area by individual Congressmen, any abuses or
excesses in the proposal were zealously criticized by fellow Congressmen,
who feared lest inordinate appropriations might cause the reduction of
the revenue available for the needs of their own districts. Hence it was

PARTY GOVERNMENT 255

relatively difficult to get by with any notorious example of graft or
wasteful expenditure.

In due time, however, the typical legislative device of "log-rolling"
suggested a way out. If special appropriations were provided for, not
in bills introduced by individual Congressmen for local needs but in the
general or omnibus bill, then the majority of the Congressmen would all
have fingers in the pie and hence a very definite reason for supporting
the general appropriation bill. From this time on, it became easy to
embody proposals for extravagant expenditures.

The pork-barrel system was well installed in the appropriations for
rivers and harbors from the close of the American Civil War, and but
two Presidents, namely, Arthur and Cleveland, have ever dared to try to
curtail the omnibus appropriation in river-and-harbor bills. The average
annual river-and-harbor bills have provided for an expenditure of around
50 million dollars, and the best authorities estimate that probably 50
per cent of these expenditures were for useless projects.

The pork-barrel system spread into the methods of appropriation for
federal buildings, such as post offices and custom houses in 1901. Be-
tween 1902 and 1919 the appropriations for federal buildings were four
times as great as all those in the hundred and thirteen years preceding
the advent of the pork-barrel method. Towns whose post-office needs
would be amply provided for in the corner of a drug store were graced by
elaborate granite or brick structures adequate for the needs of a sizable
city. C. C. Maxey cites the following interesting figures on the cost of
some post offices:

Aledo, III, population 2,144, cost $65,000; Bad Axe, Mich., population 1,559,
cost $55,000; Bardstown, Ky., population 2,136, cost $70,000; Basin, Wyo., popu-
lation 763, cost $56,000; Big Stone Gap, Va., population 2,590, cost $100,000;
Buffalo, Wyo., population 1,368, cost $69,000; Fallen, Nev., population 741,
cost $55,000; Gilmore, Texas, population 1,484, cost $55,000; Jellico, Tenn.,
population 1,862, cost $80,000; Vernal, Utah, population 836, cost $50,000.17

In 1909, the Postmaster-General complained that Congress had appro-
priated no less than $20,000,000 for the construction of post offices in
petty towns where his department believed that no changes at all were
required.

Even more notorious has been the conquest of veterans' pension legis-
lation by the omnibus bill. Down to 1908 it had been necessary to con-
sider pension bills independently and on their individual merit. There
had been abuses in pension legislation before this time, particularly under
President Harrison, when the effort was made to conceal the income from
the protective tariff by reducing the treasury reserve through lavish
expenditures for pensions. But earlier abuses were insignificant com-
pared to those which have sprung up in the last three decades, and partic-

17 On the pork-barrel system, see C. C. Maxey, "A Little History of Pork,"
National Municipal Review, December, 1919, pp. 696-697. For a more comprehen-
sive survey of graft under the party system, see C. H. Garrigues, You're Paying for
It: A Guide to Graft, Funk and Wagnalls, 1936.

256 PARTY GOVERNMENT

ularly since 1908. Between 1908 and 1916, 50 per cent more special
pensions were granted than in the forty-seven years preceding. Soon
the special pension grants each year exceeded the number allowed in the
entire thirty years following 1865. The graft and injustice connected
with the system also notoriously increased:

To say that the majority of them have provided gratuities for persons who
have absolutely no claim upon the benevolence of the country is to speak with
great moderation. When we read of the deserters, the bounty jumpers, the un-
pcnsionable widows, the remote relatives, the post-bellum recruits, and the vari-
ous other species of undeserving scoundrels who have had their names inscribed
on the pension rolls by means of the special act, we wonder whether every
omnibus bill is not a tissue of venality and corruption.18

»

The expenditures for pensions in 1922 amounted to $252,576,000, as
compared with 16 million dollars in 1865. In 1937 the annual disburse-
ments for pensions had jumped to $396,030,000, and in 1940 to $429,-
138,000. The total expenditures for pensions in all our national history,
exclusive of payments to World War veterans, had been $8,300,000,000,
to 1935. By 1936, we had already paid to World War veterans alone
in pensions and other aids over 6% billions. By 1941, the total disburse-
ments of the Veterans Administration had mounted to $24,000,000,000.
Our pension allotment is far more generous than the European practice.
For example, in the budget for 1933, the allotment for various payments
to World War veterans was $1,020,000,000. This was some forty-seven
times the payment made by European combatants for veterans' relief,
when computed on the per capita basis of the men under arms in the
great conflict.

The river-and-harbor bills, the appropriations for federal buildings,
and the exploitation of the omnibus bill for private pension grants con-
stitute the outstanding extravagances in federal financial legislation, aside
from the expenditures for armament and war.

Among the other aspects of the pork-barrel system are the now aban-
doned provisions for the distribution of tons of seed to the constituents
of Congressmen, the abuses in the congressional franking of mail, the
waste in public printing, the maintenance of assay offices, the establish-
ment and financing of unnecessary army posts and obsolete forts, and
the support of Indian schools in districts remote from the Indian reserva-
tions. These forms of waste and graft, however, when considered in their
gross volume, are perhaps more amusing than important, even though
they embody expenditures far in excess of the usual congressional appro-
priations for educational, scientific, and cultural purposes.

The foregoing represents only a part of the graft and corruption in fed-
eral government under the party system. Contracts on public works are
let, to the public disadvantage, to friends of politicians and bosses.
Money or special favors are given to legislators by lobbyists and other

18 Maxey, loc. cit.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 257

pressure groups. Appointments are handed out to friends and relatives
of politicians, especially posts outside the classified civil service. Serv-
ices, usually in the form of large donations to national campaign funds
and the party chests, are rendered by criminals and racketeers, who are
given protection by the political machine.

Bribery and venality in party government and legislation are more fre-
quent and bald in state government than in federal government. There
has been much graft in the construction of state buildings. Over twenty
million dollars was spent for the state capitol at Albany, whereas even
a generous estimate would put the actual cost at a quarter of this sum.
Even more notorious was the graft in the construction of the state capitol
at Harrisburg. The construction of state highways opened up a new and
extensive field for political graft. Inferior construction is frequently
approved by state officials in return for a kick-back from the contractors.

There is plenty of opportunity for graft in county government, in con-
nection with county buildings, highways, and contracts. But the most
notorious is the fee system which prevails in the administration of
county jails. It has been estimated that this at least doubles the expense
of running our jail system.

Since most of our great party machines originate in cities, it is not
surprising that the worst political graft has centered in city governments.
This fact has been notorious since Lincoln Steffcns published his The
Shame of the Cities in 1904. In spite of sporadic reform since then, it is
doubtful if there is any less graft.

The city of Chicago has, perhaps, been most notable for the perpetu-
ation of graft, corruption, and the spoils system. Both parties have
shared in this plunder. As a professor at the University of Chicago
once put it, "The Republican and Democratic parties are but the two
wings of the same bird of prey." The Chicago political machine has
acted as intermediary between the great banking, real estate, traction, and
public utility interests above, and the gangster elements below. The big
financial and business interests want freedom from public regulation and
a reduction of taxation. They contribute heavily to the campaign funds
of friendly machines and candidates and offer other rewards to com-
plaisant politicians. At the other end of the scale, the gangsters and
racketeers wish to be let alone in their remunerative activities in organized
crime. They pay protection money, stuff ballot boxes, intimidate inde-
pendent voters, discourage political reformers by threats and bombings,
and otherwise aid the political machine in emergencies.

It has been estimated that, in the days of the Thompson rule in Chicago,
the plain and outright graft ran to somewhere between 75 and 125 million
dollars annually. This was made possible in a number of ways. Inflated
contracts were awarded. In one 2V& million dollar paving job there was
one million dollars of sheer graft. A political printer was paid $120,000
to print the annual message of the president of the board of trusteees of
the Sanitary District. Payrolls were padded. On the average, 16 out of
every 100 names on the public payrolls in Cook County were bogus and

258 PARTY GOVERNMENT

fraudulent. In campaign years, around 2 million dollars was paid out in
bogus salaries.

Tax rebating was used as a form of political blackmail. Coal com-
panies were organized by friends of assessors and the Board of Tax
Review. Following protests about assessments and taxation, agents of
these coal companies would call and promise relief if orders for coal
were placed with them. One coal company openly printed cards with
the encouraging slogan, "Buy your coal of us and cut your taxes."
Ninety per cent of the coal in the Loop District was bought from such
companies, and in one year alone there was an assessment reduction of
500 million dollars.

High prices were paid for real estate bought by the city. City property
was often sold or leased to favored individuals at scandalously low rates.
Public funds were placed with favored bankers. Offices and promotions
were sold to the highest bidders. Large sums of money poured in from
the racketeers, bootleggers, and operators of organized vice.

In one case $2,250,000 was supposedly paid to experts for their opinions
on a city bond issue. But the experts received only a nominal salary and
the bulk of this sum went into the Thompson campaign fund. The diffi-
culty of organizing intelligent public opinion behind muncipal reform is
revealed by the fact that Mayor Thompson was able successfully to dis-
tract public indignation from municipal scandals by waging a colorful
rhetorical campaign against King George V of England. The regime of
A. J. Cermak, which succeeded that of Thompson, was held to be more
corrupt than its predecessor, and the articles by John T. Flynn in Collier's
in June, 1940, indicated that the graft and corruption in Chicago under
the Kelly-Nash machine matched that under the Thompson machine,
while the public was soothed into general acquiescence. The present
machine seems to be a more smoothly running affair than the old Thomp-
son organization.

New York City could not match the achievements of Chicago in munici-
pal graft, but it made an excellent showing, nevertheless. During the
terms of Mayor "Jimmy" Walker, who "reigned" contemporaneously with
"Big Bill" Thompson in Chicago, the Tammany Tiger enjoyed an unusu-
ally rich diet. Judge Seabury and his associates revealed many juicy
scandals in the Tammany government, but even before the investigation
such notorious scandals as those in the sewer contracts in Queens County
had been exposed. There was much graft in connection with city docks
and piers. Fee-splitting was common. One employee of the Bureau of
Standards made $25,000 monthly out of this form of graft. The firm of
a fee-splitting lawyer in the zoning department deposited $5,283,000 be-
tween 1925 and 1931. The sheriff of New York County banked $360,000
in seven years, though his salary and other official income were not more
than $90,000. The sheriff of Kings County banked some $520,000 in six
years, although his salary ran to less than $50,000 for the period. A
deputy city clerk, whose chief official duty was to marry couples, deposited
$384,000 in six years. There was much graft in the city bus system.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 259

Organized vice and gambling flourished under police protection. In the
spring of 1932, Mayor Walker resigned under pressure and fear of re-
moval. These conditions in Chicago and New York were unique only in
the size of the totals derived from graft and spoils. In Jersey City a
machine far more "reform proof" than those of Chicago and New York
was built up. The powerful Pendergast machine in Kansas City was at
least temporarily broken up by the Federal Department of Justice,
allegedly to rival Thomas E. Dewey's record as a Republican racket-
buster, but there is little doubt that this machine or another one equally
venal and powerful will reassert its authority in the not distant future.

Reform Measures and Their Fate

The more enlightened citizens, from the days of George William
Curtis and Carl Schurz in the 'eighties, have been aware of the political
degradation associated with the rise and domination of the party machine.
There have been various attempts to reduce the autocracy, corruption,
and inefficiency in party government.

Of all the attempts to limit the complete domination of the "boss," the
civil-service movement has probably been the most effective in practice.
This movement began to get under way after 1872, as a result of the
Liberal Republican revolt. It has gained momentum until today most
federal offices are, at least in legal theory, filled upon the basis of merit
as demonstrated by competitive examinations. But the federal civil
service is by no means perfect at the present time, and the state and
municipal civil-service systems are far inferior. Still, the situation has
been greatly improved, in comparison to that which existed in the time
of President Grant. However, the selection and appointment of eligibles
under the civil-service system is still determined by partisan influence.
Appointments are usually made from the three highest on the list of avail-
able persons. This allows considerable leeway for partisan influence.
Elective offices are still completely in the control of the party system.

The intimidation of the voter through a knowledge of how he is voting
was, in part, eliminated by the introduction of the Australian ballot in
the decade following 1885. At present the secret ballot is used in every
state except South Carolina. Yet the secret ballot does not fully prevent
the boss from learning how a man votes. Various special directions as
to names to be written in the blank column of the ballot can serve to
reveal the vote of an individual to the boss or his representatives about
as adequately as in the earlier days when the method of voting was by
show of hand or word of mouth. Voting machines make the control of
voters more difficult, and the political machine has tended, though not
always successfully, to resist their introduction. Boss Frank Hague of
Jersey City has been notable for his opposition to voting machines.

Attempts have been made by groups of citizens to organize for the
purpose of promoting certain types of reform legislation. By large-scale
persistent efforts it has occasionally become possible for a sufficiently

260. PARTY GOVERNMENT

powerful group of citizens to secure the introduction, if not the passage,
of bills looking towards political improvement and a better public policy.

A notable effort to break down the control of the boss and the machine
over legislation has been made through the initiative and referendum.
They were first widely used in Switzerland and were introduced into the
United States in 1899 by South Dakota. Twenty states have adopted
them in one form or another. When using the initiative, a stipulated
number of citizens affix their names to a petition and force the submission
of the proposed legislation to the people of the state. The subsequent
submission of the measure to the people is called a referendum. If a
majority of the people approves, the measure becomes law. In this way,
the law-making process can be taken out of the hands of the boss-
controlled legislature. The initiative and referendum may be worked
together or separately. When they are applied together the law is initi-
ated by the people and then approved or rejected by them. When they
are employed separately, a bill may be initiated by petition and its fate
decided by the legislature, with no popular referendum. Or, a propo-
sition may first be approved by the legislature and then submitted to a
referendum before it can become law.

These devices are intended to give the people a larger share in the
direct proposal and initiation of legislation and in the rejection of legis-
lation passed by the machine-ridden legislatures. But, excellent as these
have been in theory, their practical operation has not been conspicuously
successful. The people have shown a general apathy, the education of
the populace has been difficult, and the general body of citizens have found
it hard to vote intelligently on the technical problems involved in many
measures. If they vote at all on such matters, they often prefer to accept
the suggestions of the party leaders. It is still true, therefore, that most
legislation is introduced and passed at the behest, and under the control,
of the machine leaders.

Attempts have been made to reduce the volume of corruption in politics

(1) by publicizing and curtailing primary and campaign expenditures;

(2) by impeachment or dismissal of legislators and public officials found
guilty of receiving bribes; (3) by investigations of building scandals in
connection with state structures and public works; and (4) by the intro-
duction of a budget system, thus reducing the possibility of the wholesale
graft and wild expenditures involved in the "pork-barrel" and "rider"
devices.

The large expenditures for nomination and election to public offices
have encouraged efforts to curb these abuses. Laws — especially the
Federal Corrupt Practices acts from 1911 to 1925 — designed to prevent
elections from being a walkaway for the wealthy, have outlawed con-
tributions from employees of the federal government; forbidden con-
tributions from national banks and public corporations; limited the
amount that may be spent in campaigns for federal offices ; made it illegal
to promise a job as a reward for political support; tabooed bribery in
voting; and ordered campaign expenses to be listed.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 261

But even these commendable measures have failed adequately to
remedy the situation. The poor man is still handicapped. The laws
exempt from inclusion under election expenses everything spent for per-
sonal expenses — stationery, postage, printing, telephone and telegraph
charges — in short, most legitimate electioneering expenses. Friends or
friendly interests may still spend, directly or indirectly, almost unlimited
funds for the candidate. Expenditures may be made at other times than
during the campaign without any severe restrictions. Great deficits may
be piled up and paid off after the expense report has been filed. The
much-heralded reporting of expenditures is often perfunctory and gets
little publicity unless there are alert newspapers that scent a scandal.
There is little machinery for enforcing existing legislation. Finally,
primaries are often exempted from these restrictive laws, and in many
cases, as noted before, it is the primaries and not the elections that count.

Rejection by legislative bodies of successful candidates who have
spent too much in primaries or elections is no adequate solution, for it
cannot be relied upon to operate in every case. Also, this device affects
only the successful contestant. His opponent may have spent more.
For example, in Pennsylvania, Mr. Vare's opponent for the senatorial
nomination in 1926, George Wharton Pepper, is said to have spent even
more in the primaries than Mr. Vare did.

The most drastic efforts to curtail intimidation and corruption in polit-
ical campaigns and to limit expenditures in national elections were em-
bodied in the Hatch Acts of August 2, 1939, and July 20, 1940. They
were brought about by the scandalous use of WPA money and jobs to
influence primaries and campaigns, especially the senatorial primary and
campaign in Kentucky. They were designed to prevent federal em-
ployees from taking any active part in political campaigns beyond their
personal exercise of the right of suffrage. These laws make it illegal
for government employees even to use their personal influence to affect
the voting of a single individual. The 1940 Act extended this prohibition
to state employees receiving any payment from the federal government.
It also limited the annual expenditures of any national committee to
3 million dollars and personal campaign contributions to a national com-
mittee to $5,000. Except where limited by a state law, contributions to
state and local committees may be of any amount.

These laws have had some effect, but there is plenty of subterfuge and
it is difficult to enforce such legislation. As we have pointed out above,
there are many ways in which one may evade legal limitations on cam-
paign expenditures. That even such drastic legislation cannot curb exces-
sive expenditures may be seen from the fact that more money was spent
in the campaign of 1940 than in any other in American history — about
14 millions by the Republicans and 6 millions by the Democrats. The
Democrats also made good use of the bait of the large armament expendi-
tures they controlled. On account of the limitations imposed by the
Hatch Acts, most of the money had to be dispensed by other agents than
the national committees.

262 PARTY GOVERNMENT

The complete tyranny of the party machine in the selection of candi-
dates has been lessened by the direct-primary system. Certain early
anticipations of the principle came in the California law of 1866 and the
Ohio law of 1871, but most of the progress has been made since the open-
ing of the twentieth century. In large part, the contemporary movements
towards direct primaries were the result of the agitation of the elder
Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin, in his struggle against the boss-
dominated conventions in his state. The direct-primary system was
thoroughly introduced in Minnesota in 1901, and has been utilized in
widely varying degrees in all but three of the states of the Union —
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Mexico.

The most extended use of the direct primary in the United States
has been in nominations for the presidency. The presidential preference
primary was first established in Oregon in 1910. In 1912 some ten states
used it. By 1916, twenty-two states had mandatory presidential primary
laws and three others permitted a preferential vote on presidential candi-
dates. It was believed at this time that all states would soon have
presidential primary laws, but the movement fell off sharply after 1916.
No states have adopted it since then and several that once used it have
abandoned it.

While, in theory, the direct primary provides admirable machinery to
break down the control of the bosses over the nomination of party candi-
dates, it has in practice proved unsatisfactory. This has been due to
the lack of public interest and intelligence in its operation. The majority
of the voters usually remain away from the polls on primary day and
allow a few faithful members of the old guard, who vote under the
direction of the machine, to cast most of the votes for the candidates. In
this way, the machine actually controls nominations, as it did under the
old caucus and convention systems. The main difference is that it costs
the state a great deal more to select candidates under the primary system.
In fact, so indifferent have the people shown themselves to the direct
primary in some states that they have allowed the bosses to reintroduce
the convention system.

For the emotional power of party symbols and catchwords, the effective
antidote is knowledge of the real meaning of political parties, their true
function in political life, and the ways in which politicians deceive the
citizens by party propaganda and symbolism. As Graham Wallas
pointed out in the first part of his Human Nature in Politics, party
symbols lose their power once the people are shown how they have been
duped by them in the past. Political education can thus furnish a real
campaign psychotherapy.

Still most of the voters, even college graduates, are likely to react
to political appeals on an emotional plane. Education is most effective
with those who already consider public and other problems in a rational
light. In many ways the situation is more depressing than it was forty
years ago, when Graham Wallas wrote his book. Propaganda technique
has been improved during this period. The radio and the movies have

PARTY GOVERNMENT 263

provided new mechanisms for propaganda. The poor average voter is
even more at sea and less capable of getting at the real truth than he was
four decades ago. At the very moment when problems are most com-
plicated and when clarity of thought and adequacy of information are
most essential, propaganda is most effective in blinding and misleading
the average citizen.20

Broadly, one may say that the reform of contemporary party govern-
ment is but a phase of the necessary reorganization of modern political
life as a whole. It is doubtful whether complete direct majority rule
would be desirable even if we could obtain it. In all probability, society
will always be dominated by the superior intellects, unless certain un-
fair institutions and obstructive practices prevent real leadership from
asserting itself. Hence, the somewhat autocratic aspect of political
parties is not, in itself, to be deplored. It is probably both inevitable
and desirable.

Most disastrous in modern party autocracy is the type of leader who
has dominated contemporary political parties. We must supplant the
corrupt boss by educated leaders, who will assume responsibility in public
service. No doubt this is only a pious aspiration, but the only solution
of the problems of democracy lies in concentrated efforts to realize this
worthy goal.

Intelligent political leadership is not likely to operate effectively unless
linked with an active popular interest in political life, and the latter is
nearly impossible under the political conditions that exist in the modern
state. The great territorial states of the present time, with their com-
plexity of social and economic problems, have so far removed govern-
ment from the interest and scrutiny of the average citizen that he is
unable to grasp its nature and problems. The citizen has thus lost most
of his interest in, and practical knowledge of, general political issues.
His sole participation in politics usually lies in an unreasoning allegiance
to some emotion-provoking party or personality.

The active interest in government which characterized citizens in earlier
periods, when small political units were the rule, can be revived, in part,
by increasing the importance of local government, thus bringing many
important governmental problems closer to the people. Community in-
terests and community organization, as R. M. Maclver and Miss M. P.
Follett have 'pointed out, might be greatly strengthened. The powers
of the central government could be restricted to certain large general
interests that concern all the citizens of the entire country. By thus
emphasizing the local political community, it is likely that the citizens
would begin to take a greater interest in problems of government and be
able to jexert a more intelligent control over public affairs. But it must
be conceded that the main trend is now towards greater centralization in
government. Another promising proposal of political reform lies in
wiping out the irrational practice of basing representative government on

20 See below, pp. 554 ff ., 572-573.

264 PARTY GOVERNMENT

territory and population, and the substitution of representation by pro-
fessions and vocations. Under such a system, every citizen would have
his own occupation or profession directly and immediately represented
in the government. This would give a real logic and vitality to political
affairs. The voter might then take an active interest in the nomination
and election of representatives. He would be likely to insist that the
representatives of his profession or vocation be competent and worthy
members of that particular calling. He would no longer be willing to
be represented in a law-making body by a person whom he would be
embarrassed to entertain in his home or recognize upon the street. Per-
haps the best brief statement of this extremely important reform pro-
posal is contained in an article by Harry B. Overstreet, in The Forum:

One of the most serious defects of our political machinery is found in the
prevalent theory of representation. It is curious how contentedly we accept that
theory as if it had been handed to us from Sinai's top, noting that the times
have so changed as to make the theory no longer truly applicable. We view
it as a matter of course that a political state should be divided into its smaller
units, and these into still smaller units, and these into still smaller; and that in
each unit citizens should vote as members of the unit. Thus the group of people
who constitute precinct eleven of district four of the borough of Manhattan
recognize, as a matter of course, that their political identity lies in their member-
ship within those territorial boundaries. The person who "represents" these
citizens represents them as inhabitants of that particular territory.

Amid all the serious questioning of our political procedures, it is curious that
this system of territorial division and territorial representation is accepted prac-
tically without question. And yet it is not an exaggeration to say that of all
features of our political life, it is the one that is most distinctly out of date and
the source of the most serious political inefficiency. It is not difficult to see that
at one time in the history of society such a system was the only one that could
work with secure and comprehensive success. In a community thoroughly agri-
cultural, for example, similarity of interest was in the main identical with spatial
propinquity. If, in such a community, one were to district off a square mile of
inhabitants, one would find that within that square mile the interests were
fundamentally alike. If one were to take another square mile a hundred or a
thousand miles away, one would find, indeed, that the interests differed some-
what from those within the first square mile — the difference between wheat land
interests, for example, and grazing land interests, — but within the second square
mile one would again find the interests fundamentally alike.

It was this fact that gave the territorial plan of political districting its erstwhile
excuse for being. But suppose one advances to a manufacturing and commercial
community of today and districts off a square mile of inhabitants in any large
city. Within the boundaries of that small domain one finds a barber living next
to a grocer, a grocer next to a real-estate broker, a real-estate broker next to a
school teacher, a school teacher next to a saloon keeper, a saloon keeper next to
a mason, a mason next to an actor, etc. Within the square mile, in brief, are
interests as worlds apart as they possibly can be; and yet our political system
operates upon the supposition that all this heterogeneous mass of beings can be
swept into one unity by the mere fiction of political demarcation. ... *

Social enthusiasm can be evoked only where there is a spirit of the group.
But a, spirit of the group lives only where men feel that they belong to each other.
Men thrown accidentally together by the chance renting of this apartment or
that house cannot be made to feel that they deeply belong together. Herein lies
the profoundest defect of our modern political system. We are attempting, in
short, to bring into expression group loyalties and group enthusiasms when the

PARTY GOVERNMENT 265

groups through which we operate are largely and inevitably artificial. There is
no cure for this, save as we face frankly the issue of organizing political life into
its truly natural groups. . . .

Is the evolution of political society complete, or may we look to a further
development of social and political grouping? The answer, I think, lies in the
recognition that the groupings of the past were determined by the nature of
men's occupations. For the huntsman life was a roving existence and the only
possible bond of union was the impalpable bond of descent. For the agriculturist,
life was a settled occupancy in which the bond of union was the perfectly palpable
one of land. Are men in large measure changing the nature of their occupations?
The answer is clear. Agriculture, while still fundamental, is increasingly com-
panioned by occupations that make profound alterations in our life. Indeed, the
present age may properly be characterized not as an agricultural but as a manu-
facturing and commercial economy. If now the change from hunting to agri-
culture brought to pass an essential transformation of the principle of social and
political grouping, may we not rightly expect that the change from the agricul-
tural to the manufacturing and commercial economy will effect a transformation
of equal moment ?

The significant change that has occurred is that territorial propinquity is no
longer coincident with community of interest. ... if one were to trace the lines
of interest demarcation in a great city, one would find them here, there, and
everywhere, crossing and recrossing all the conventional political boundaries. If
one seeks, in short, the natural groupings in our modern world, one finds them
in the associations of teachers, of merchants, of manufacturers, of physicians, of
artisans. The trade union, the chamber of commerce^ the medical association,
the bar association, the housewives' league — these even m their half formed state
are the fore-runners of the true political units of the modern state. . . .

That this change, from the territorial to the vocational basis of political group-
ing, perplexing as will be the problems which it will generate, will mean much
for our political life cannot, I think, be doubted. Of primary importance will
be the fact that the basis of selection of candidates will be both logically and
psychologically superior to that of the present system. A group of a hundred
physicians or of a hundred teachers or of a hundred artisans would be far more
capable of making secure judgment upon one of its number than a helter-skelter
group of citizens selected according to locality. Again, for a man desirous of
serving the public welfare, there would be a peculiar joy in standing for the
fellows of his craft. His appeal to them for support would be an appeal to their
understanding and their intelligent interests. There would be no need for him
to lower himself to that type of campaign cajolery which is necessary, apparently,
when the appeal must be made to all sorts and conditions of men. It is precisely
the undignified character of the prevalent politiccal methods of campaigning that
deters many a sensitive mind from offering service to the public — the printing
of one's photograph on cards, the widespread distribution of self-laudatory hand-
bills, the posting of conspicuous placards, the ringing of innumerable doorbells,
the whole sorry business, in short, of making one's self a general public nuisance,
of doing what any decently self-respecting man would in ordinary circumstances
utterly shrink from doing. But to offer one's self to the fellows of one's craft —
that is a far different matter. One comes then not as a stranger. One comes
as a worker, known among fellow workers. One has not to force one's self, as
it were, down the throats of the indifferent and the unknowing. One stands
on one's honorable reputation, and one is accepted or rejected as that reputa-
tion is taken to be adequate or not. The whole spirit of elections, in short,
would change from an undignified attempt to wheedle and cajole and hypnotize
men into a transient support, into a self-respecting expression of willingness to
serve one's fellow men. ...

The objection is often raised that occupational grouping would simply mean a
battle of interests, each group fighting for itself, In the first place; matters,

266 PARTY GOVERNMENT

in this respect, could scarcely be worse than they now are. In the second place,
groups such as we have indicated are not, in their interests, antagonistic. House-
wives are not antagonistic to physicians; nor carpenters to teachers' nor ministers
of religion to outdoor unskilled workers. As a matter of fact, trie interests of
many of these groups coalesce, as in the case of housewives, teachers, physicians,
etc. But what is significant is that, with as many occupational groups as we have
indicated, no constant balancing of interest one over against the other would be
possible — as would be the case, for example, if the occupational groups were, as
has elsewhere been suggested, farmers, merchants, clerics. . . .

It would be folly, of course, to pretend that a high grade of political efficiency
will be attained at once when men change from the anorganic system of terri-
torial to the organic system of vocational grouping. But it may at least be
maintained, with some show of reason, that with that change, one of the most
insidiously persistent obstacles to political efficiency will have been removed.21

A general adoption of proportional representation would be likely to
stimulate political interest and activity, especially in areas where one
party has been overwhelmingly powerful and the minority has little or
no actual representation in government. But proportional representation
requires a high degree of political intelligence and public interest.

Finally, a great extension of realistic education upon public problems
and political machinery must be provided. At the present time, there is
little realistic political education in the public schools and surprisingly
little even in the universities. Greater attention must be given to the
study of government, and the instruction in such courses must be some-
thing more than a superficial description of the external forms of political
institutions and pious generalizations as to the theoretical operation of
political machinery. The real nature and purposes of existing party
government must be candidly taught, and the defects of our present
experiments very clearly brought out. Above all, our teachers must cease
inculcating in the minds of students, of whatever age, the fictitious dogma
that our form of government is not only better than any other in existence,
but is perfect and not open to extensive improvement. Humility is the
beginning of wisdom, no less in political affairs than in any other field
of human activity.

The outlook for successful party government was, until the second
World War, brighter in some parts of Europe than in the United States.
Vocational and proportional representation had made headway in the
governments set up since 1918. Where these did not exist something
which achieved roughly similar results, the group or bloc party system,
prevailed. There tended to be more realistic political interest there than
in our own country. If dictatorship gains, it will triumph at the expense
of the representative system and party government. Fascism and dicta-
torship present the same deadly challenge to party government that they
do to democracy. Where there is no democracy there can be no real
party government.

In the United States, E. M. Sait, A. N. Holcombe, and P. H. Douglas,
among others, have argued for the desirability of breaking up the old and

21L0c. cit., July, 1915.

PARTY GOVERNMENT 267

irrational Republican-Democrat dualism and creating a real conservative
and liberal alignment. In fact, Professors Douglas, John Dewey and
others believe that we should have a definitely radical party to represent
workers and farmers, even though this might produce a tripartite set-up
of conservatives, liberals, and radicals. Some rumblings a few years ago
indicated that such a movement might be getting under way, but as yet
the visible evidence of a new party alignment is less impressive than the
logic of those who advocate such a development. The defense move-
ment and the second World War have at least temporarily suppressed it.
What the party line-up, if any, will be at the close of the war cannot be
foretold at present.

If it is a rational party alignment, suitable for the stimulation and
successful operation of democracy, it should provide for three strong
major parties — a conservative party, a liberal party, and a radical party.
A one-party system is a vehicle of totalitarianism ; our two-party system
utterly lacks logic and realism, never more so than today; and a bloc
system makes for confusion and chaos.

CHAPTER IX

The Crisis in American Democracy and
the Challense to Liberty

A Brief History of Democracy

DEMOCRACY has been viewed mainly as a political concept, meaning
government by the majority, or the rule of the people. This majority
rule has been achieved by means of universal suffrage, and, usually,
through representative government. Only rarely, as in the colonial town
meeting or the forest cantons of Switzerland, has the population been
small enough so that all the people can govern directly without choosing
representatives. Representation has been the rule.

Party government has provided the main machinery whereby repre-
sentative government is realized and practiced. For the most part, repre-
sentative government has been carried on in conjunction with republican
forms of political institutions; but formal monarchy can be made com-
patible with democracy, as in Great Britain, which has carried on a
rather advanced form of political democracy in association with tradi-
tional monarchy.

Especially interesting has been the "democratizing" of the very concep-
tion of democracy in the last century. The old Aristotelian notion of the
"people" as the upper-class and middle-class members of society, which
persisted down to the close of the eighteenth century, has been supplanted
by the contemporary view, which regards the people as embracing all
members of society, with no important exceptions. Consequently, the
conception of "government by the people" meant quite a different thing
when used by Lincoln from what it did in the days of Aristotle, of the
Magna Carta, of Locke, or of the Fathers of our Constitution.

More recent scholars have begun to see that democracy is more than
merely a form of government based on majority rule. F. H. Giddings,
for example, finds that democracy is a particular kind of government, a
specific form of the state, a special type of social organization, and a
definite mode of social control. As a method of government, a "pure
democracy" implies the enfranchisement of the majority of the popula-
tion and direct participation of all the citizens in public affairs. The
much more common "representative democracy" is defined as one in which
the citizens govern indirectly, through periodically selected deputies or

268

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 269

representatives. As a type of state, democracy implies the existence
of popular sovereignty — the ultimate power of the people. As a type of
social organization and control, democracy means both a popular organ-
ization of the community and the free control of nonpolitical activities
through the force of public opinion.

A number of students of democracy are dissatisfied with a formalistic
and static analysis of democracy. They have given it a pragmatic defi-
nition and have endowed it with a dynamic perspective. John Dewey
and James Harvey Robinson, for example, hold that democracy not only
requires the popular control of public policy but also implies a type of
social organization that will develop to the fullest extent the latent poten-
tialities of every member of the society. It imposes upon society the
moral obligation to do everything in its power to hasten the realization
of such a state of affairs.

A couple of generations back, it was assumed that democracy originated
in primitive political assemblies, especially the folkmoot of the primitive
Germans. Anthropological research has upset this notion. There was
a certain amount of vsocial and political democracy among early peoples,
particularly in the pre-tribal periods. Representative government made
its first appearance in tribal assemblies. But, by and large, well-
developed primitive society showed marked aristocratic traits, and
monarchy of a somewhat crude type appeared among some primitive
peoples. But millenniums of monarchy, aristocracy, and imperialism
intervened between primitive times and the origins of modern democracy.

In the ancient near Orient, democracy had little opportunity to assert
itself. Kings ruled with absolutism and divine right, often being them-
selves regarded as partly divine. Among the Greeks, a limited type of
representative government and democracy attained a high degree of
development, especially among the Attic Greeks. But Athenian democ-
racy was exclusive — a closed-shop — being limited to the citizen class.
The slaves and the Metics, the latter a non-citizen foreign-born class,
outnumbered the citizens at all times. In Rome, democracy was even
more restricted than at Athens. The plebeians temporarily won the right
of self-government; but the trend was towards dictatorship in the last
century of the Republic, and imperialism and aristocracy became defi-
nitely established. For a time in the Empire the emperors became abso-
lute and asserted divine right. When the imperial power abated in the
later Empire, government lapsed into a preliminary sort of feudalism,
in which the great landlords were the dominant class.

There were two substantial contributions to democracy during the
Middle Ages. One was the social democracy, albeit a servile democracy,
which was developed in the cooperative life on the communal medieval
manor. The other was the contributions to representative government
made in the medieval communes, in the system of estates in the medieval
monarchies, and in the Conciliar Movement in the Catholic Church at
the close of the medieval period.

During the so-called Renaissance, the importance of the individual

270 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

gained emphasis, though monarchy and tyranny all too often dominated
the political scene. Likewise, while the Protestant reformers encouraged
royal power and sanctioned divine right, the Reformation did stress the
importance of individualism in the religious sphere. But it remained for
the expansion of Europe and the Commercial Revolution to lay the basis
for modern democracy through the growth of representative government
and the increased power of the middle class.

The era of exploration and discovery and of subsequent colonization
and world trade increased the number and powers of the mercantile
middle class in western Europe. At first, this group joined with the ab-
solute monarchs in crushing their mutual enemy, feudalism. But soon
the merchants found the new national monarchs as oppressive as the
feudal lords had ever been. They interfered with trade, levied arbitrary
taxes, and confiscated property. So, in a series of important revolutions
the middle class subordinated absolute monarchy to representative gov-
ernment. They realized that the only practical way of controlling the
monarchs was to make the representative branch of the government
supreme. The first permanent success was in the English Revolution
of 1688-1689. This struggle of the middle class to create representative
government and to give it a constitutional sanction ran through the
American Revolution, the series of French Revolutions after 1789, the
Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in continental Europe, and the Russian
Revolution of 1905.

But this did not mean democracy. The suffrage was exercised mainly
by the landed gentry and the merchant class. The workers and the
peasants had little or no part in government. But the creation of repre-
sentative government was a very significant contribution to democracy.
It was only through making the representative branch of the government
all-powerful that universal suffrage could later bring about true democ-
racy. It accomplishes nothing to elect representatives unless they have
power to m^ke laws.

There were, however, two real anticipations of democratic doctrine in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the period of the
Commonwealth in England, in the middle of the seventeenth century, a
group of political radicals known as the Levellers, led by John Lilburne,
asserted that the people are sovereign and held that the whole mass of
Englishmen should have the right to vote and thus control Parliament.
They foreshadowed many of the democratic policies of the English
Chartists, two centuries later.1 In eighteenth-century France, Jean
Jacques Rousseau asserted that all laws must be submitted to a popular
referendum; if approved, they became expressions of the general will and
were therefore valid and binding upon the whole mass of the people.

In the nineteenth century, democracy was definitely established in
the progressive states of the western world. The more important achieve-
ments in this direction were (1) extension of the suffrage; (2) greater

1 C/. T. C. Pease, The Leveller Movement, American Historical Association, 1917.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 271

importance of the popular or legislative branch of the government, as
compared with the executive; (3) growth of representative institutions;

(4) a broader conception of the scope and functions of government ; and

(5) written constitutions that acknowledge and guarantee these progres-
sive accomplishments.

As the Commercial Revolution created representative government, so
did the Industrial Revolution bring about political democracy. The
merchants had felt it necessary to increase the powers of representative
government in order to protect their interests. In the nineteenth century
the oppressed urban proletariat and the farmers believed it essential to
capture the right to vote to alleviate the distressing conditions under
which the laborers and farmers were compelled to live and work.

Since England was first thoroughly affected by the Industrial Revo-
lution, it was natural that European democracy would show its first
marked developments in England. The famous Reform Bills of 1832
and 1835 strengthened representative government in Parliament and in
the cities, respectively. The dramatic and comprehensive Chartist move-
ment embodied the following demands: (1) universal manhood suffrage;
(2) vote by ballot; (3) equal electoral districts; (4) removal of property
qualifications for members of Parliament; (5) annual elections to Parlia-
ment; and (6) payment of members of Parliament. While the Chartist
movement was discredited at the time (1848), five out of six of its
demands have since been realized. Only annual elections to Parliament
remain to be realized. Universal suffrage came through a series of partial
victories. In 1867 Disraeli extended manhood suffrage to the majority
of urban residents. In 1884 Gladstone did as much for the rural dwellers.
But down to the first World War, the poorer classes in both city and
country could not vote. Finally, in February 1918, a suffrage bill was
passed which granted universal suffrage to all males and limited suffrage
to women. Universal female suffrage was finally secured in 1928.

The masses won the right to vote in most of the other major European
states during the course of the nineteenth century. France put a uni-
versal male suffrage act on the statute books in 1848, being the first
major European state to do so. The law was never repealed, though
under Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire the representatives elected
by the people had little actual power in law-making. The German Em-
pire provided for universal manhood suffrage in 1871. This applied to
elections to the Reichstag; but the aristocratic Bundesrat was more
powerful than the Reichstag, and the aristocratic government of Prussia
dominated the empire as a whole. The failure to recast the electoral dis-
tricts between 1871 and 1918 also tended to frustrate democracy and
representative government.

In Austria-Hungary, representative government was assured by the
Constitution of 1861 and the legislation governing the union with Hun-
gary in 1867. Universal manhood suffrage was secured through acts of
1896 and 1907. Cavour saw to it that representative government was
created in Italy, and universal manhood suffrage was provided for in

272 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

laws of 1882 and 1912. The lesser European states provided for universal
suffrage late in the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth.

Russia has never enjoyed universal suffrage. The Tsars excluded the
masses from the right to vote, and the Bolsheviks denied the right of
suffrage to the aristocracy and the capitalistic classes. Since, however,
the aristocrats and capitalists were either killed off or driven out of
Russia, there has been universal suffrage in actual practice in the Soviet
Union.

In Europe the growth of democratic ideals and practices depended pri-
marily upon the growth of industrialism and the rise of an urban pro-
letariat. In the United States, the impulses coming from the proletariat
were very powerfully supplemented by the influence of the western
frontier upon political ideals. Because of the two major forces making
for democracy in our country, democratic developments here were rather
more rapid and sweeping than in the Old World. Political democracy
was thoroughly realized in the United States, at least in a legal sense,,
by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the first half of the century
the main achievements consisted in the abolition of the aristocratic prop-
erty qualifications for the exercise of the suffrage, the termination of
imprisonment for debt, and the popularization of the concepts and prac-
tices of democracy as a result of the Jacksonian system.

The political theories of men like Jefferson still had a strong Aristotelian^
flavor and they laid great emphasis upon special training, high intelli-
gence, and expert direction of government. With the advent of the;
Jacksonians in 1829, the "dangers" of special preparation for office were^
emphasized and supreme faith was placed in "pure" democracy. Rota-
tion in office and the "spoils system" became characteristic of adminis-
trative procedure. Whatever the excesses of the Jacksonians, this period1
deserves credit for the institution of political democracy in the United!
States. The Jacksonian democrats also believed in the equality of man,
and they wiped away what had hitherto been powerful vestiges of social
aristocracy. By 1840, the United States had become a political democ-
racy, before any other major state in the world.

' The scandals of the "spoils system" were curbed by the civil-service
reform begun in the administrations of Grant, Hayes, and Arthur and
supported by Cleveland, particularly in his second term. Though it was
weakened somewhat by McKinley, it was revived with renewed vigor
by Theodore Roosevelt and Taft and has been extended since the first
World War.

A powerful impulse to democracy in the latter part of the nineteenth
century came as a result of the various radical movements which sprang
up mainly in the West among the depressed and embattled farmers. Such
were the Greenback, Granger, and Populist movements, and the Bryan
democracy, which was strongly supported by the workers in the East.
In these movements began the tendency to subject private corporations,
especially railroads, to public control. More liberal taxation and cur-
rency policies also arose. With the end of the frontier, in 1890, rural

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 273

western radicalism began to decline, but it left a heritage that remained
for a generation or more. It gave vigorous support to Senator La Follette
as late as his presidential campaign of 1924. The Eastern workers have
developed several proletarian political movements of a radically demo-
cratic character. Such are the Socialist party, the Socialist-Labor party,
and the Communist party. Of these the Socialist party, led by Eugene
Victor Debs, and Norman Thomas, was for long the most important. As
we noted in the preceding chapter, these third-party movements left their
main permanent impress upon American political life by forcing the
major parties to adopt some of their radical ideals and policies. We have
already mentioned some of the more radical democratic devices, such as
the initiative, referendum, and direct primaries in dealing with attempted
reforms of party government.

One great obstacle to social democracy in America — Negro slavery —
was removed in part as a result of the Civil War. But because of race
prejudice, final solution of the Negro question is not likely to be reached
for another century. The strength of the Progressive party in 1912 and
the victory of the Democratic party in 1912, 1916, 1932 and later may be
regarded as gains for social democracy. They were symptoms of popular
protest against the domination of American politics and legislation by
the conservative wing of the capitalistic class that arose after the retire-
ment of President Theodore Roosevelt, and again after the liberalism
of President Wilson had collapsed.

Unfortunately, the decline of morale and intellectual alertness in the
United States after the first World War led to a reign of the corrupt
plutocratic interests quite unprecedented in our national history, if not in
the whole- history of representative government. The effort of the late
Senator La Follette to lead the people in a crusade against this national
disgrace in 1924 proved a humiliating and portentous failure. The great
economic depression beginning in 1929 stimulated a revival of idealism
and progressivism.

The notable achievements all too briefly enumerated above have con-
stituted great strides in the direction of political democracy. But they
have left still unsolved many grave problems that must be met and
conquered before democracy can be finally achieved. Universal suffrage
and representative government have made political democracy possible
but have not by any means assured its existence. As Lord Bryce and
Robert Michels have well pointed out, the political boss is as much an
obstacle to democracy as was the feudal lord to democratic tendencies in
the medieval period. Attempts have been made, which are as yet only
partially successful, to eliminate his sinister influence through such de-
vices as the direct primary and' the civil-service laws. Archaic forms of
political institutions are often; found unsuited to achieve the desires and
needs of the people. Such machinery as the initiative, the referendum,
and the recall has beerr introduced in the hope ofc making government
more sensitive and Hflore responsive to the public will.

Many of the pfioftlema related, ta the operation- afi representative insti-

274 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

tutions>are yet to be solved. To meet this need such schemes as minority
and proportional representation and representation of occupational groups
have been proposed. Then, Sumner, Hobhouse, and other more recent
-publicists, like Norman Angell and Frederick Schuman, have reminded
the world that most difficult and perplexing problems are involved in
reconciling political democracy at home with the repression of subject
peoples in imperial dominions.

Finally, no one can seriously maintain that social and economic democ-
racy exists when we have to face such economic and social inequalities as
are revealed in the sober and reliable statistics gathered by every great
modern nation. It is not desirable that society should permanently adopt
any method of determining social and economic reward, other than that
based upon services rendered to society. However, the prevailing meth-
ods of deciding the value of services are sadly in need of revision, partic-
ularly in the direction of preventing rewards from being inherited instead
of earned. Further, we have yet to make sure that all members of society,
in proportion to their innate ability, shall obtain equal opportunity and
reward for rendering services to society.

Real and practical obstacles to democracy are the rise of Fascism and
Communism, and the growing popularity of government by dictatorship.
Whether in Germany, in Italy, or in Russia, dictatorship has appeared
more immediately efficient than democracy. The strains and stresses of
the world in the economic depression have made many persons more
impatient of the relatively inefficient and easy-going ways of democracy.
The whole social set-up today, at least superficially, seems to encourage
the propaganda in favor of Fascism and dictatorial government.

The second World War was bound to deliver a heavy blow to democ-
racy. The small European democracies were brought within totalitarian
dominion. Unoccupied France rapidly put off her democracy in favor of
totalitarianism. England adopted wartime totalitarianism, in order to
defend herself efficiently. It became quite obvious that the restoration
of democracy as it was in 1938 would be difficult, if at all possible. Even
for the United States, the prospect was not too bright. As William Henry
'Chamberlin in The American Mercury, December, 1940, put it:

It is a familiar teaching of history that men learn nothing from the observation
of the past. Yet America's experience in the World War is surely recent enough
to afford some useful guidance. The Dead Sea fruits of America/s first crusade
to make the world safe for demqcracy were communism and fascism. A second
crusade, which would have to be on a much larger scale because America would
have fewer allies, could have, I think, only one certain result: the definite and
perhaps permanent disappearance of liberalism in America.

Some Major Assumptions of Democracy in the Light
of Their Historical Background

The assumptions of the democratic movement must be considered in the
light of the political institutions and scientific knowledge between fifty
and a hundred years ago, as well as in terms of the political experience

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 275

and scientific data available today. Certain premises now discredited
might, at an earlier period, have been legitimately entertained by those
not in possession of our present political experience or our contemporary
scientific knowledge concerning man and society.

The early protagonists of democracy assumed the essential permanence
of a simple agrarian type of society. Jefferson himself, scarcely a de-
fender of any extreme type of democracy, believed that even republican
government could coexist only with a society founded on an agricultural
basis: "I think our governments will remain virtuous for many cen-
turies ... as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America.
When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they
will become as corrupt as in Europe." 2

Hence we can scarcely condemn the original sponsors of democracy if
the system which they promulgated has failed to prove adequate to prob-
lems forced upon it by the complex urban and industrial civilization of
the present day. To be sure, this qualification does not necessarily
prove that democracy would have been fully successful, even if society
had remained agricultural in character.

Another assumption was the laissez-faire theory of government. Most
of the earlier exponents of democracy, including Godwin, Jefferson, Cob-
den, and the German liberals of 1848, held that the best government is
the one that governs least. One exception, however, was the socialistic
drive for democracy and universal suffrage under such leaders as Ferdi-
nand Lassalle, who frankly repudiated the laissez-faire ideal. There also
were exceptions to Jefferson's individualism, as there were to his strict
constructionism in constitutional theory, but he certainly believed that
there should be no more governmental intervention than absolutely neces-
sary. He once went so far as to say that a free press is worth more
than any government.

There were differences of opinion among Jacksonians, but the Jack-
sonian era, as a whole, witnessed a retrenchment of the public activities
sponsored by the Whigs — especially the support of internal improvements.
The tariff was progressively lowered. The United States Bank was
brought to an end. Federal aid to public improvements was withdrawn,
and federal loans to the states became less lavish. It was the Jacksonians
who prevented public control or ownership of transportation facilities,
such as developed widely in Europe. In its germinal period, democracy
was closely intertwined with political individualism. It will be con-
ceded by most historians that a form of government that was successful
under a Spencerian brand of individualism would be far less efficient in
a society dominated by ideals of extensive state interference.

A central thesis of the supporters of political democracy was the firm
belief in the essential equality of all men, the observed existing differences
being assigned to inequalities of opportunity. The earlier American

2 Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. by Paul Leicester Ford, Putnam, 1892-1899,
10 vols., Vol. IV., pp. 47&-480.

276 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

friends of a more liberal or republican political system did not believe
in the equality of man, however much they may have subscribed to the
formal equality of all before the law or the theological equality before
God. Jefferson, for example, actually accepted with minor qualifications
the Aristotelian dogma that some are born to rule and others to serve. He
only believed that the people could be trusted to choose the wisest men
to lead them. His own experience seemed to vindicate his judgment, for
the people turned out his aristocratic opponents, the Federalists, and
elected him, and then his disciples Madison and Monroe for two terms
each. The Sage of Monticello joined his "fathers" just after Monroe had
been succeeded by the son of Jefferson's old Federalist rival. Jefferson's
conception of the natural aristocracy that should rule society is well
stated in the following passage from a letter to John Adams, written in
1813;

For I agree with you that there is a liatural aristocracy among men. The
grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among
the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well
as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, polite-
ness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground for distinc-
tion. There is also an artificial artistocracy, founded on wealth and birth, with-
out either virtue or talents ; for with these it would belong to the first class. The
natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruc-
tion, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been
inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to
have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of society.
May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides
the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices
of government ? The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in govern-
ment, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency.3

The "honest-to-God" democrats of the Jacksonian and post-Jacksonian
period, however, believed, or pretended to believe, that all men are essen-
tially equal in ability, and hence are uniformly and equally fitted to cast
their votes. It was also held that no special training or experience is
essential to the successful execution of the functions of any political office.
Indeed, some of the Jacksonians even declared that a long and successful
career in office is a serious disqualification for political life, on account
of the potential development of the bureaucratic spirit. It was held that
a general system of education, open to all, would produce almost complete
cultural and intellectual uniformity in society. Hence the democratic
movement was associated with a strong impetus to popular education.

The theory of human equality and the equal fitness of all to hold office
was not then so absurd as it has now become, as a result of our differential
psychology and the complicated nature of governmental problems. Par-
ticularly in the frontier society of Jackson's day, there was a much
closer approximation to equality than in most modern societies. Severe
selective processes made the surviving frontier settlers relatively uniform

3 Jefferson, op. cit., Vol. IX, p. 425.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 277

in ability. A man who could weather the dangers and hardships of west-
ward migration, and contend successfully against Indians and wild beasts
after settling on the frontier, was likely to be able to shoulder the rela-
tively simple responsibilities of government that prevailed in these areas.

The exponents of democratic theory also believed that the mass of
the people would take a very ardent interest in all phases of political life,
once the right to vote was extended to them. It was believed and hoped
that the people would veritably mob the polls at daybreak on each election
morning, in order to exercise the God-given privilege of casting their
ballots. This assumption was not so absurd a century ago, when most
of the functions of government were related to local needs and the daily
life of the people.

Associated with this premise of universal interest in using the ballot was
the crucial hypothesis that the people would carefully examine both
candidates and policies, size up all political situations, and then register
a choice based upon careful reflection on all the salient facts available.
Political campaigns, in short, were expected to be periods of intensive
adult education in the field of public affairs.

The democratic dogmas were formulated when the popular type of
psychology was the so-called Benthamite "felicific calculus." This as-
sumed that man is a cool and eminently deliberative animal who bases
every act upon the relative amount of pleasure to be secured and the pain
to be avoided. He would support the candidate and party which he
believed would bring him the greatest benefits. This rationalistic psy-
chology dominated political thinking from Bentham to Bryce, and was
not thoroughly laid at rest until the appearance of Graham Wallas's
Human Nature in Politics in 1908. This view was not so ridiculous
before scientific psychology proved the fundamentally nonrational nature
of human and group behavior.

Some appeared to mistrust the administrative efficiency of democracy
and the rational qualities of the masses, but believed that, even if the
people are incapable of analytical reasoning, at least they are sensitive
to moral issues ; that they can be trusted far more than the educated and
capable minority to sense injustice and promote idealistic causes. As
evidence were cited the popular support of the Abolitionist movement
against slavery and, more recently, the alleged democratic basis of the
Prohibition movement.

The democratic theory was formulated, for the most part, with the
exception of the work of the socialists, in an age that held to the theory
of political determinism in history. It was believed that political insti-
tutions are of basic importance in social causation and that a political
system could determine the whole character of civilization. Majority
rule would produce a completely democratic society.

Madison, Calhoun, and a few others held that government is merely
the umpire of conflicting social and economic interests. Jeffersonians
and the agrarians also implied that politics depends upon economics,
when they held that an agricultural society was essential to the success

278 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

of republican government. But the general tendency of the age was to
put complete trust in the political structure of society. The crusade
for universal suffrage and democracy was based mainly upon that notion.
The ideas and program of the English Chartists are a good illustration
of this attitude.

The democratic theory was also worked out in harmony with the
philosophy of unmitigated nationalism, with little consideration for
political tendencies abroad or the state of international relations. Demo-
cratic dogma was not unique in this respect, for the nationalistic obsession
dominated the outlook of monarchs and aristocrats as well at this time.

Democracy Put to the Test

Striking and extensive have been the changes in the social setting of
political institutions since the days of the quasi-bucolic New England
township of John Quincy Adams and the crude frontier society of
Jackson. We have now our urban industrial world civilization, which
presents an ever increasing variety of conditions that must be regulated
in some degree by political action. The whole set-up of life conditions
that lay back of the democratic movement has all but disappeared. In
the words of Will Durant:

All those conditions are gone. National isolation has gone, because of trade,
communication, and the invention of destructive mechanisms that facilitate inva-
sion. Personal isolation is gone, because of the growing interdependence of pro-
ducer, distributor, and consumer. Skilled labor is the exception now that
machines are made to operate machines, and scientific management reduces skill
to the inhuman stupidity of routine. Free land is gone, and tenancy increases.
Free competition decays; it may survive for a time in new fields like the auto-
mobile industry, but everywhere it gravitates towards monopoly. The once
independent shopkeeper is in the toils of the big distributor; he yields to chain
drug stores, chain cigar stores, chain groceries, chain candy stores, chain restau-
rants, chain theaters — everything is in chains. Even the editor who owns his
own paper and molds his own mendacity is a vestigial remnant now, when a
thousand sheets across the country tell the same lie in the same way every day
better and better. An ever decreasing proportion of business executives (and
among them an ever decreasing number of bankers and directors) controls the
lives and labors of an ever increasing proportion of men. A new aristocracy is
forming out of the once rebellious bourgeoisie; equality and liberty and brother-
hood are no longer the darlings of the financiers. Economic freedom, even in
the middle classes, becomes rarer and narrower every year. In a world from
which freedom of competition, equality of opportunity, and social fraternity have
disappeared, political equality is worthless, and democracy becomes a sham.4

The laissez-faire theory of political inactivity has given way before
differing degrees of state intervention, extending all the way to overt state
socialism. Even in the United States, with its theoretical individualistic
philosophy, a degree of state activity was accepted that would have filled
Jefferson with greatest alarm. Modern life has created a host of issues

"Is Democracy a Failure?" Haiyer's, October, 1926, p. 557.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 279

that not even a plutocratic and individualistic political organization can
ignore.

Modern biology and psychology have revealed the presence of marked
individual differences of ability on the part of those inhabiting the same
community. The army mental tests given in 1917-1918, which covered
the unusually large and representative sample of 1,700,000 recruits,5
showed that only about 13 per cent of the population can be described as
superior types capable of distinguished leadership. The majority range
from intellectual mediocrity to relative incompetence. Forty-five per
cent have a mental age of twelve or under, once regarded as sure proof of
feeble-mindedness. To be sure, the leaders still, on occasion, guide the
masses, even in a democracy; but we cannot expect to secure sagacity or
wisdom merely by counting noses.

Many writers, like the late Charles Horton Cooley, contend that the
masses possess great innate shrewdness in selecting their leaders. This
thesis is hardly borne out by the selection of presidents of the United
States since the Jacksonian period. The outstanding ones — Lincoln,
Cleveland, the two Roosevelts, and Wilson — were all chosen as the result
of an accident, a political fluke, or a special economic crisis. Herbert
Agar has stressed this point in his book The People's Choice.

Differential biology and psychology have shown that, to cope with the
difficult problems of today, we must install in government the superior
types equipped with expert knowledge, and not trust the judgments of
the common people. The available data seem to justify restriction of
the suffrage to those above the moron level or a weighted system in which
additional voting power would be assigned to those with superior intelli-
gence quotients. Men of high intelligence are not necessarily always
equipped with superior social morality or civil idealism; but neither are
the less intelligent any more endowed with these qualities than with in-
tellectual talent. Stupidity and integrity are certainly not inseparable.
Certainly, the control of politics must be associated with intelligence and
cogent information. The solution lies in socializing the elite, not in defy-
ing or denouncing intelligence.

Most political posts today require of the incumbent a technical knowl-
edge as great as that possessed by a distinguished economist, technician,
physican, or law professor. Yet, as Durant has well said, we require
much more technical preparation for a physician or druggist than we
insist upon for a Congressman, a governor, or even a President:

The evil of modern democracy is in the politician and at the point of nomina-
tion. Let us eliminate the politicians and the nomination.

Originally, no doubt, every man was his own physician, and every household
prescribed its own drugs. But as medical knowledge accumulated and the
corpus prescriptionum grew, it became impossible for the average individual,
even for solicitous spinsters, to keep pace with the pharmacopoeia. A special
class of persons arose who gave all their serious hours to the study of materia

5Cf. E. G. Boring, "Intelligence as the Tests Test It," New Republic, June 6,
1923.

280 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

medica, and became professional physicians. To protect the people from un-
trained practitioners, and from those sedulous neighbors who have an interne's
passion for experiment, a distinguished title and a reassuring degree were given
to those who had completed this preparation. The process has now reached the
point where it is illegal to prescribe medicines unless one has received such train-
ing, and such a degree, from a recognized institution. We no longer permit
unprepared individuals to deal with our individual ailments or to risk our
individual lives. We demand a lifetime's devotion as a preliminary to the pre-
scription of pills.

But of those who deal with our incorporated ills, and risk our hundred million
lives in peace and war, and have at their beck and call all our possessions and all
our liberties, no specific preparation is required; it is sufficient if they are
friends of the Chief, loyal to the Organization, handsome or suave, hand-shakers,
shotilder-slappers, or baby-kissers, taking orders quietly, and as rich in promises
as a weather bureau. For the rest, they muy have been butchers or barbers,
rural lawyers or editors, pork-packers or saloon-keepers — it makes no difference.
If they have had the good sense to be born in log cabins it is conceded that
they have a divine right to be President.6

We can provide expert guidance for ignorant legislators and adminis-
trators, but some modicum of education is essential in order to utilize
expert advice with any competence when it is offered. If a governmental
official becomes merely a rubber stamp in the hands of his expert advisers,
we have bureaucracy instead of democracy. The average Congressman
or state legislator can decide whether or not a new plank should be added
to a bridge or whether a common pound should be repaired; but it is
impossible for an untrained man to exercise expert judgment with respect
to international financial problems, the tariff, government control of rail-
roads, state ownership of coal mines, public health, monopoly, or the
regulation of radios and airplane traffic. The day is over when govern-
ment can be conducted by rule of thumb, the rhetorical canons of Isocrates
or Quintilian, or the spicy parliamentary repartee of seasoned politicians.
Democracy cannot be "wisecracked" out of its current difficulties.

While the problems requiring government control or supervision have
become more numerous and complex, the quality of our public officials
has declined. Without sharing in a conventional and unthinking eulogy
of tjie "Fathers," no informed person could well suggest that the caliber of
our public servants today matches that of officials in the period from 1790
to 1828. In the last half-century an important transformation took
place in American political practice, as a result of which we seemingly no
longer desire or expect real leadership in government. The great eco-
nomic interests, for all practical purposes, took over the government.
Men of great personal ability, real dignity, wide learning, and inde-
pendence of character — even if conservative — were no longer wanted in
political offices, for such persons do not invariably take and carry out
orders with complete servility.

These considerations may explain why the business interests were long
highly suspicious of an able conservative like Herbert Hoover; and why

6Durant, loc. dt., p. 563.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

281

a conservative if occasionally independent and outspoken scholar like
Nicholas Murray Butler was not looked upon with favor by the business
interests as presidential material.

Yet, government by the interests is not so simple as some seem to
believe. There is highly divided counsel in the orders given to their
political servants, owing to the diversification and conflict of economic
policies among the capitalists. For example, international bankers want
free trade, so that their foreign debtors can pay in goods, while indus-
trialists favor high tariffs to protect them against foreign competition.
Industrialists may desire moderate inflation to stimulate business; the
main powers in speculative finance usually want "sound money" to insure
full payment of debts due them.

Perhaps the chief service of the democratic illusion, at present, is that
it enables countries such as the United States to operate this "bellhop"
system of government successfully and yet keep the people reasonably
well satisfied, by means of the agreeable fiction that they themselves are
running matters through their elected representatives. However, this
artifice does not constitute any permanent solution of the problems of
contemporary political control. Cunningly contrived plutocracy is no
suitable substitute for democracy.

The old assumption that the masses would evince an all-absorbing
interest in public matters the moment that they received the vote has been
dissipated by political experience since 1828. Studies of nonvoting in the
United States by Merriam, Gosnell, Schlesinger, Eriksson, and others show
that, even in presidential elections which evoke the most widespread
interest, only about half of the qualified voters cast ballots. The follow-
ing statistics illustrate what Professors Schlesinger and Eriksson well
designate as "the vanishing voter":

UNITED STATES ELECTION DATA

Year Actual Vote Eligible Vote

1856 4,194,088 5,021,956

1860 4,676,853 5,555,004

1864 4,024,792 4,743,249

1868 5,724,686 7,208,164

1872 6,466,165 8,633,058

1876 8,412,733 9,799,450

1880 9,209,406 11,024,900

1884 10,044,985 12,412,538

1888 11,380,860 13,800,176

1892 12,059,351 15,488,748

1896 13,923,102 17,241,642

1900 13,959,653 18,272,264

1904 13,510,648 19,864,495

1908 14,888,442 21,598,493

1912 15,036,542 24,276,236

1916 18,544,579 28,484,046

1920 26,786,758 51,156,684

1924 29,091,492 54,421,832

1928 36,876,419 57,276,321

1932 39,734,351 60,389,827

1936 45,646,817

1940 49,569,165

Percentage Voting
83.51
84.19
84.8$
79.42
74.90
85.84
83.53
80.92
82.46
77.85
80.75
76.39
68.00
68.93
61.95
65.10
52.36
53.45
63.86
65.13

282 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

Even the excitement of the first opportunity to vote did not bring the
expected number of women to the polls in 1920, their record apparently
being even worse than that of the men. The intense economic stake of
the masses in the New Deal did, however, lead to a marked increase in
the turn-out of the voters to re-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936
and 1940. The vote in state and local elections and in congressional
elections in "off years" is far smaller than in presidential contests. The
popular vote in direct primaries, which select the candidates for election,
has proved so small as often to make the whole scheme of primaries, once
a favorite reform hope, a travesty. Those plebiscites in which important
issues are submitted to the people in the form of the referendum seem
to evoke less enthusiastic response than the election of officials.

The distant, large-scale, and complicated nature of contemporary poli-
tics has destroyed that sense of immediate local interest and that per-
sonal curiosity about candidates which were characteristic of the earlier
type of neighborhood politics. A sense of political vagueness and futility
has today superseded the once keen personal interest in policies that
directly and visibly concerned the everyday life of the individual, and in
candidates who were personal acquaintances of most of the voters.
Political indifference is also due to the cynicism generated by the un-
reality of modern partisan politics and the accompanying graft and
incompetence. Sophisticated voters feel that it makes little or no dif-
ference which party or policy prevails. The seeming absence of vital
differences, between major party methods and policies has become essen-
tially the fact in American political life today. This state of affairs
refutes the thesis that representative government is always bound to
create parties with marked differences as to policy and procedure.

A disconcerting aspect of the democratic debacle is the popular in-
difference to the so-called remedies for democratic failures. It has often
been held that "the remedy for democracy is more democracy"; namely,
direct primaries, the initiative and the referendum, and the recall of
officials and judicial decisions. The unfortunate fact is that if the
people could develop the interest and intelligence essential to any effective
use of such mechanisms as the initiative and the referendum, they would
be able to govern without them. The experience with these devices of
radical democracy in the last generation has shown that they fail as
often as democracy of a more moderate type, and for the same reasons.

We in this country are accustomed to the unreality of political life and
to the general lethargy of the public thereunto. But we assume that this
is the exception rather than the rule. Particularly do exponents of
democracy point to the popular enthusiasm and intelligence manifested
in politics in Great Britain. However, William G. Peck, an English
publicist, shows that this is a pious illusion in his article, "The Decline
of British Politics."7 While English politics were both exciting and

7 Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1937-38.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 283

popular at the turn of the century, they had the air of the morgue and
the intelligence of senile dementia from 1919 until the second World War:

Such scenes [of popular excitement] were common in those days [of the Boer
War]. They no longer happen. Our politicians have no magic. The quality
of political debate has sadly declined. Pure politics is no longer news as it
once was. The newspapers dp not report the Parliamentary proceedings as a
tacred duty — most of them give but a tabloid summary of what occurred at
Westminster on the previous day. At any time between my seventeenth and
thirty-fifth birthdays, I could have given you at a moment's notice the names
of all the cabinet ministers in office at the time. Most of my friends could have
done the same. Today I could not name more than three or four off-hand, and
I think there is none of my friends who could do much better.

In the old days a constituency at election time was positively ablaze with the
rival colours. Nowadays, it is quite possible to walk through an English town
a few days before an election and to find few visible signs that the inhabitants are
aware of what is going on. Crowds of people no longer listen quietly to long
expositions of policy. The platform is more suspect than the pulpit.

Down to the close of the first World War, there was a realistic economic
basis for English political activity. From the Napoleonic wars through
the struggle over the Reform Bill of 1832, there was a good battle on
between vested agrarian privilege and the new bourgeois element which
formed the Liberal party. After 1832, however, capitalism was accepted
by both Conservatives and Liberals. From 1832 to the World War, these
parties fought over the handling of capitalism and democracy, Liberalism
demanding greater rights for the common man and Conservatism defend-
ing imperialism and a big navy.

After 1918, the only real economic problem was the drastic reconstruc-
tion of capitalism and the creation of a new economic and social order.
The Liberal party was killed by the war, and the Conservative party was
moribund and stupid: "There fell upon English politics a sense of un-
reality. The very ground of the long party controversy had disappeared.
The past battles took on the appearance of a sham fight." The Labor
party had something of a chance to step into the breach, but it lacked
decisive leadership. "It was their misfortune to arrive at the moment
when genius and resolution of the highest order were required to make
decisions at one of the supreme turning points of history; and their leader
was the verbose, well-meaning, and totally indecisive Ramsay Mac-
Donald." The Labor party fell down notoriously in the case of the
general strike of 1926 and in the crisis which preceded the formation of
the Coalition "National Government." As a result, England has passed
into the twilight zone of politics: "We linger in this twilight. There is
no voice of national authority pointing a path to the new morning. The
only thing we can do is to build a mighty navy and prepare our youth
for the storm and terror that hover the not-distant horizons." The
events of 1938-39 offered a tragic confirmation of Mr. Peck's dire fore-
bodings.

No less mythical in practice has been the democratic thesis that the
people have high capacity for calm deliberation in choosing candidates

284 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

and for sober scrutiny of public policies. In the first place, only about
half of the electorate, on the average, shows enough interest in either
candidates or policies to turn out at the polls. The nonvoters pre-
sumably neither deliberate nor scrutinize and, if they do so, it is of no
practical significance. It can hardly be held that the actual voters do
much deliberating. The methods of modern political parties during
campaigns are not designed to promote calm reflection and penetrating
insight into the real facts, issues, and personalities involved, but are
calculated to stimulate emotion and to paralyze thought. The successful
party is usually the one that develops the best technique for stirring the
emotions of the masses rather than the one which presents the most
intelligent candidates or platform.

Further, modern social psychology has amply proved that man is not
a cool, calculating being, invariably choosing that line of conduct which
he believes is sure to bring him a maximum of benefit and a minimum
of discomfort. He is, rather, a creature dominated by such irrational
factors as tradition, custom, convention, habit, and the passions of the
mob. These irrational influences are particularly present and potent in
political campaigns. One's political preferences are determined chiefly
by the circumstances of birth and upbringing, which usually lead the
child to adopt the politics of his parents. Most of us are "biological"
Democrats or Republicans. To this hereditary background are added
the emotion-provoking antics of those who plan and execute campaigns,
at the psychic level of the mob. There is, therefore, little opportunity
for any calm deliberation or careful scrutiny, or for the exercise of that
shrewd insight into the qualities of candidates which was long believed to
be the particular attribute of the common people.

The argument that democracy is vindicated, if on no other grounds, by
the special capacity of the masses for moral judgments and support of
great idealistic causes, is easily seen to be mainly specious. In the first
place, we now realize that there can be nothing really "moral" that is
not scientifically sound.8 The populace has neither the information nor
the intelligence to ascertain what is actually valid in regard to moral
situations. The only way in which the public can be useful in moral
questions is through the development of popular confidence in the judg-
ment of trained and informed leaders. Most of the great moral crusades
have not had a popular origin, but have been the result of arousing
popular support for movements begun by some educated and intellectually
superior reformer. The two great moral reforms which come nearest to
reflecting mass pressure in the United States have been Abolition and
Prohibition. These have been widely regarded as ill-conceived and
disastrous in their ultimate social results, though the desirability of
freeing the slaves and arriving at a more rational control of the con*
sumption of alcoholic liquor has been readily conceded.

Progress in political science and economics has shown that the old

» See below, pp. 714 ff .

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 285

theory of political determinism is hopelessly superficial and inadequate.
The laws of social causation, which have now been established, have
proved that political institutions are derivative and not primary. A
political system cannot create a social order. A given pattern of economic
and social conditions produces, in time, a compatible type of political
structure, making due allowance for divergences in detail caused by
differences of historical background and variations in culture. Hence
democracy alone cannot be relied upon to mold a social system satis-
factory to its needs. It can only thrive where social conditions are
suitable to encourage democratic institutions.

Another obstacle to the success of democracy in practical experience
has been the rise of a permanent bureaucracy in the official civil service.
In the United States, democracy has been weakened by the inefficiency
and corruption growing out of our lack — at least, until recently — of a
well-trained and public-spirited civil service. England has been praised
for having one. But, while British administrative efficiency has gained
as a result, democracy has suffered. So powerful has the permanent
bureaucracy become that the initiative and authority of the ministry
and the Parliament have become severely curtailed. The elected repre-
sentatives in Great Britain cannot seriously alter the policies and
procedure of the permanent civil service. It would require a political
revolution to do so. Ramsay MacDonald and the Labor government
were criticized by radicals for not going further with the reconstruction
of England. They were held back, not only by their failure to have a
clear majority in the House of Commons, but also by the fact that they
did not dare to challenge the civil-service bureaucracy. The Foreign
Minister is1 usually a puppet of the permanent Under-secretary of Foreign
Affairs. In short, where we have no bureaucracy we have inefficiency;
and where we have bureaucracy we usually cease to have real democracy.

The reasons outlined above show that the older "nose-counting"
democracy is hardly suited to the exacting requirements of our com-
plicated industrial civilization. Indeed, some of our best writers on
contemporary society doubt the adequacy of political institutions as a
mode of social control. They are demanding a new form of social con-
trol, based upon and conforming to, the economic and social realities of
the present age. Technocracy is the most advanced proposal of this
sort. W. K. Wallace's The Passing of Politics 9 is a representative
example of the advocacy of the abandonment of political institutions by
a conservative thinker. Syndicalism is based upon the assumption of
the archaic and antiquated character of political institutions. It recom-
mends a simple and direct process of government through the economic
groups that exist today.

The nationalistic obsession has proved a dangerous doctrine for
democracy in a world-society. Democracy cannot ignore international
conditions. A great war in an age of "international anarchy" can

oMacmillan, 1924.

286 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

destroy the political institutions that have been evolving and approaching
perfection for many years. The system of government and reform in
England at the outbreak of the first World War was probably the highest
pinnacle that democracy has attained — or may ever attain — in a major
state. Yet, the .system was devastatingly shocked, if not permanently
wrecked, by the impact of the first World War.

Democracy was proved an inadequate defense against going to war
in the crisis of 1914, when bellicose political leaders of England and
France could plunge their fundamentally pacific populations into the
abyss. Georges Demartial's The War of 1914- How Consciences Were
Mobilized, Caroline E. Playne's Society at War, Irene Cooper Willis'
England's Holy War, C. H. Grattan's Why We Fought, Walter Millis'
Road to War, and Porter Sargent's Getting U. S. into War present
magnificent clinical pictures of the futility of democracy as a safeguard
against war.

The first World War was probably the greatest blow to democracy
since the dismal failure of the Revolutions of 1848. There has been, at
one time or another since 1918, what amounted to a practical dictatorship
by a single person or a committee in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria,
Russia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria,
and Turkey. In other European states emergency governments have
ruled with quasidictatorial methods. The fate of Czechoslovakia, Den-
mark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France in the second World War
further demonstrates the fatal impact of war on democracy. William
Henry Chamberlin is probably correct in declaring that war is the most
certain "shortcut to Fascism."

The protagonists of autocracy now have at their disposal ample evi-
dence that when democracy threatens to become virile and efficient it
can be easily checked by launching another war. One may safely say
that though democracy may be equal to the requirements of a peaceful
society, there is no doubt of its incapacity to endure in the face of the
strains of war. To point to the efficiency of the United States during
the first World War is no refutation of this statement. This efficiency
was purchased by disproportionately greater sacrifices of democratic
institutions and intellectual freedom.

Lord Bryce, the outstanding student of the rise and character of modern
democracy, was compelled to admit, at the end of his studies, that democ-
racy had failed to achieve the main results that had been hoped from it:

It has brought no nearer friendly feeling and the sense of human brotherhood
among peoples of the world towards one another. Neither has it created good-
will and a sense of unity and civic fellowship within each of these peoples. ... It
has not purified or dignified politics . . . and has not induced that satisfaction
and contentment with itself as the best form of government which was expected.10

10 James Bryce, Modern Democracies, new ed., Macmillan, 1921, 2 vols., Vol. II,
p. 533. Cf. Wallace, op. cit., pp. 190 ff., and C. L. Becker, "Lord Bryce on Modern
Democracies," in Political Science Quarterly, December, 1921.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 287

There is, perhaps, no other summary estimate of the contributions and
failings of democratic government so authoritative or inclusive as that
presented by Bryce:

I. It has maintained public order while securing the liberty of the individual
citizen.

II. It has given a civil administration as efficient as other forms of govern-
ment have provided.

III. Its legislation has been more generally directed to the welfare of the
poorer classes than has been that of other Governments.

IV. It has not been inconstant or ungrateful.
V. It has not weakened patriotism or courage.

VI. It has often been wasteful and usually extravagant.
VII. It has not produced general contentment in each nation.
VIII. It has done little to improve international relations and ensure peace,
has not diminished class selfishness (witness Australia and New Zealand), has
not fostered a cosmopolitan humanitarianism nor mitigated the dislike of men
of a different colour.

IX. It has not extinguished corruption and the malign influences wealth can
exert upon government.

X. It has not removed the fear of revolutions.

XI., It has not enlisted in the service of the State a sufficient number of the
most honest and capable citizens.

XII. Nevertheless, it has, taken all in all, given better practical results than
either the Rule of One Man or the Rule of a Class, for it has at least extinguished
many of the evils by which they were effaced.11

. However, democracy has hardly, as Bryce implies, obliterated class
rule. While democracy originated in an agrarian age, the growing
dominion of the capitalist class has coincided remarkably with the prog-
ress of political democracy. Many authorities, such as Calvin B. Hoover,
believe that capitalism can survive only in association with a democratic
government.

Democracy and the Political Future

One of the most frequent apologies for democracy is that it is unfair to
say that democracy is a failure, since it has really never been tried.
Though we have long enjoyed universal suffrage in the United States,
it is pointed out that the real power in government is concentrated in
the hands of a few very wealthy individuals — that we have plutocracy
and not democracy. James W. Gerard stated that 59 men rule America.
Much attention was given to Ferdinand Lundberg's book America's Sixty
Families, which, he said, rule our country.

There could be no more effective proof of the futility of conventional
democracy than the fact that we have enjoyed universal suffrage in the
United States for a hundred years without realizing true democracy. If
we have not been able to establish democracy in this country in the past

n Bryce, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 562.

288 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

century, when general social conditions were far better adapted to democ-
racy than they are today or probably will be tomorrow, what hope
is there that we shall be any closer to real democracy a hundred years
hence?

Several hundred years hence the historians of political theory and
institutions may describe conventional democracy as the most interesting
and attractive political fiction of the nineteenth century. It may be
shown to be something that, as originally understood, never did and never
could exist on a large scale. For the conditions that promoted conven-
tional democracy and in conjunction with which it might have existed —
a simple agrarian society and a stable civilization — were already passing
away when the democratic dogmas were first being fashioned. Before
popular government was realized in practice those social conditions which
were compatible with it had all but disappeared. Likewise, the theoret-
ical assumptions upon which conventional democracy was launched —
the equality of man, high potential interest in public affairs on the part
of the masses, and penetrating rationality of the populace in political
matters — have been disproved by the development of social science and
the test of political experience. Hence the political problem of the
future is not to vindicate conventional democracy, but seek some form
of social control more tenable in theory and more adapted in practice
to the requirements of the contemporary age.

There is, then, no inherent reason why one should view with despair the
debacle of the older democratic dogmas and practices. We are today
often amused when we read of the dismay with which the autocrats of
previous centuries viewed the declining strength and prestige of abso-
lutism and special privilege. We should learn by their example and
recognize that it is just as foolish to be staggered by the current break-
down of conventional democracy. There is no reason to believe that
we may not find future forms of government that are far superior to
conventional democracy in efficiency and service to mankind.

Some of the disillusioned friends of democracy, contending that it is
manifestly impossible to find a more successful form of government, seek
cqmfort in the thought that all other forms of government have proved
to be worse. This implies, however, a retrospective attitude. The
"worse" forms of government are those of the past. We have no means
of knowing how greatly we may advance beyond those earlier methods
and devices, all of which were worked out in a crude manner, on the basis
of limited political experience and very little scientific knowledge. There
is no reason why we should not exhibit in the political field the same
originality and inventive ability that we have displayed in the techno-
logical field.

The problem is really one of getting efficient and social-minded leaders
into positions of authority and responsibility. We must have the effi-
ciency, training, and professional political spirit, say, of the old Prussian
bureaucracy, divested of its class spirit, its arrogance, and its oppressive-

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 289

ness. Intelligence tests, information tests, special professional training,
and successful experience for office-holding; the establishment of well-
equipped government schools for the training of officials in every branch
of the government service, both domestic and foreign; and some com-
bination of vocational and proportional representation to give justice
and rationale to representative government — these would seem to be
suggestions that are surely worthy of consideration and might be woven
into the structure of the new democratic state. More power and vitality
in local government units would doubtless help a good deal. The elimi-
nation of sumptuary legislation and unnecessary state interference would
relieve the strains upon administration and decrease the burdens of polit-
ical control. Many argue, however, that the fundamental changes in
the economic and social structure in the last century render such reforms
as these superficial, inadequate, and about as futile as the old fashioned
democratic ideals and practices.

It is too often taken for granted that we must today choose between
traditional democracy and totalitarianism — that there is no alternative
between the old nose-counting system and brutal dictatorships. This
is unfortunate. By representing the political future as one which in-
volves the espousal of either traditional democracy or totalitarian dicta-
torship, we limit our vision and paralyze our efforts. Those who feel
sure that they must choose between a corrupt and inefficient democracy
and a Nazi regime, for example, naturally prefer even the archaic democ-
racy and determine to stick to it at all costs. If we could keep clearly
in mind the fact that we might readily find new types of democratic gov-
ernment which avoid both the inefficiency of the older democracy and
the tyrannical cruelty of dictatorships, we would be likely to devote more
energy to political invention and have greater hope for the political future.

Almost invariably, totalitarianism has succeeded democracy because
of the inefficiency of the latter. If we simply hang on to an outmoded
democracy in blind desperation and make no serious effort to improve
it or to find a better substitute, we are bound, sooner or later, to wind
up in totalitarianism, with all its evils. We should face the political
future with sceptical enthusiasm and not imagine that we must accept
either those past forms of government which have proved inadequate or
undesirable, or those more novel types which are repugnant to all liberty-
loving men.

Among the most interesting suggestions which have been made in
recent years are those related to the growing interest in the program
of Technocracy and in "The Managerial Revolution."12 We have al-
ready noted that the problems with which democracy has to deal in our
complicated economic age are far beyond the capacity of the average

12 Harold Loeb, Life in a Technocracy, Viking Press, 1933; James Burnham, The
Managerial Revolution, Day, 1941; and Carl Dreher, The Coming Showdown,
Little, Brown, 1942.

290 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

administrator or legislator, when they have to be handled through -the
machinery of politics. But, viewed as an engineering problem, and
divorced from considerations of property, profits, and politics, they are
relatively direct and simple. A corps of competent industrial engineers
could easily determine the material needs of the American population
and lay out an effective plan for producing the goods and services needed.
A thorough economic regimentation would be required, but it would
affect most people for only a few hours each day. Outside of the eco-
nomic realm, unbounded liberty might be enjoyed for participation in
education, discussion, recreation, leisure, and the arts. It may be that
the future solution of our political problems will involve economic regi-
mentation under experts in the material realm, and thorough-going
democracy in the "things of the spirit" — the realm in which the virtues
and values of democracy chiefly reside.

The most frequently proposed plan for a new type of social control,
divorced from the political or territorial state is the functional state,
governed directly by the natural vocational groups which exist in modern
industrial society. We presented Professor Overstreet's program for
such a type of reform in the preceding chapter, wherein a political system
would not be injected between society and its administration of public
affairs. The various vocations, professions, and trades would govern
directly through their representatives. The Syndicalists once proposed
this form of government, but they called for social control through labor
organizations alone — a proletarian form of functionalism. But there is
no reason why a capitalistic democracy could not operate a functional
state without accepting any proletarian revolution.

Some, who have not been willing to go this far, would retain the
political state for general legislation, dealing with broad measures of
social welfare, and then leave the execution of such measures to spe-
cialized administrative organizations, who would possess the technical
information and equipment to apply these general measures in detail.
We may note a trend in this direction in the United States, in the form
of the increasing number and importance of administrative commissions.

The deficiencies of democracy in our complicated urban industrial
world-civilization have led to a sweeping repudiation of democratic prac-
tices in the last twenty years. For this deplorable development the
friends of democracy have been in part to blame by claiming traditional
democracy to be perfect and eternal. Had they candidly admitted its
defects and made a strenuous effort to remedy them before it was too late,
the recent and menacing development of dictatorship might not have
taken place.

The Struggle for Civil Liberties

The Nature of Civil Liberties. Democracy and civil liberties are
closely associated. Indeed, democracy has been defended against totali-
tarianism primarily because it is likely to cherish and defend liberty.
Liberalism is the chief asset of the democratic system. As convenient

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 291

a panorama of the whole field of civil liberties as is likely to be provided,
has been gathered together by Leon Whipple:

I. THE RIGHTS— PERSONAL LIBERTY

1. The Right to Security— life, limb, health.

2. The Right to Liberty — freedom of the body, and freedom of movement,
with the privilege of emigration or immigration.

3. The Right to Equality — protection against slavery, involuntary servitude,
and imprisonment for debt; against discriminations on account of color or sex,
and (in general) race; and against special or hereditary privileges. These are the
Civil Rights, or rights of the citizen.

4. The Right to Reputation.

5. The Right to Bear Arms and to Organize the Militia.

6. The Right to Law:

a. Before Trial:
Justice shall be free;

The accused shall have the right to the common law;

No unreasonable search or seizure;

The right to the writ of habeas corpus shall not be denied;

The accused shall hear the accusation;

Bail shall not be excessive;

Trial shall be on indictment after investigation by a grand jury;

Witnesses shall be protected in their rights;

The accused shall be protected against "lynch law."

b. During Trial:

The accused shall have "due process of law, law of the land, and judgment

by his peers;"
He shall have a trial by a jury of the vicinage; defined as to size, and

the need for unanimity;
He shah1 have counsel ;
He may summon witnesses;
No inquisitorial methods shall be used;
He shall not be put twice in jeopardy for one offense;
The crime of treason shall be defined;
There shall be no attainder.

c. After Trial:

No excessive fines, or cruel or unusual punishments;
No ex post facto law shall be passed;
Provision for pardoning is usually made;
There shall be no corruption of blood.

II. THE FREEDOMS— SOCIAL LIBERTY

1. Freedom of Conscience — especially religious liberty, including no state sup-
port, tpr enforced individual support of an established church; and no religious
tests for participation in the government.

2. Freedom of Speech and Assemblage, including petition.

3. Freedom of the Press — with legal provisions against tyrannical coercion by
libel proceedings or for contempt of court.13

18 Our Ancient Liberties, H. W. Wilson Company, 1927, pp. 13-14. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher. For a comprehensive bibliography, dealing with every
phase of civil liberties, see George Seldes, You Can't Do That, Modern Age, 1938,
pp. 254-301.

292 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

Most of these rights and liberties first appeared as a theory in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. They were the subject of much discus-
sion as the "natural rights of man," rights which were not regarded as
man-made, or a product of human institutions, but as inherent in the
cosmic scheme — a part of the natural and divine order. According to
this theory, man had enjoyed these rights when he lived in a hypothetical
state of nature prior to formal social control. When man placed himself
voluntarily under a government, the continuation of his rights was to
be guaranteed by the state. This whole doctrine is absurd when taken
in any literal historical sense, however valuable a purpose it may have
served as propaganda for a truly noble cause. There is no such thing as
a "natural right" to anything — even life itself. So far as nature is con-
cerned, we have only the rights of a wild animal — the right of the strong
or the crafty to get all they can or wish.

In the course of time, classes and individuals have wrested from society
as a whole — the herd — certain rights and privileges. These remained
valid so long as the said classes and individuals, or their descendants,
could defend them. There is no certainty that these rights have always
been wise concessions. The point we are making is that persons or
groups, which wanted them and were powerful enough to get them, suc-
ceeded in establishing certain rights and immunities. In other words,
human prerogatives were always secured in the give-and-take process
between society, classes, and individuals. They are not natural rights.
They are conferred by society, willingly or not. No man has any natural
right, even to keeping his jugular vein intact.

The Historical Origins of Civil Liberties. In primitive society there
were no formal guaranties of individual right or immunities. Custom
and usage, however, created certain personal rights which were usually
observed within the group. In the ancient Orient, while many rights of
property and contract were protected, there was little personal freedom.
The philosopher of history, Hegel, is said once to have remarked that in
this Oriental era only two were free — God in heaven and the king on
earth. Certainly, there was no freedom of religion, conscience, the press,
speech, or assemblage. Even semidivine kings found it impossible to
alter the religious system radically.

Among the Attic Greeks and the Romans, a large degree of personal
liberty was enjoyed by the artistocracy. The doctrine of criticism and
free thought arose among the Greeks and continued to exist in Rome
until the establishment of an Oriental despotism. There were limitations
in practice, to be sure, but its legitimate place in the social system was
well established. The Greeks introduced the custom of trial by jury.
The Romans first permitted the individual to emerge as a recognized
entity. According to law, he had certain rights, which the government
was bound to respect. This was the origin of the legalistic aspect of
our civil liberties, for in the eyes of the law these legal rights are our
civil liberties. The state, acting through the constitution, announces that
there are certain rights and immunities which the individual may. enjoy

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 293

and which the government cannot take away. Only a change in the
constitution can deprive the individual of these rights and immunities.

In the Middle Ages, there was a marked reversion to a cruder type of
civilization, politically controlled by semibarbarous kings and dominated
by a church absolute in its power over religion and conscience — and even
over life. This was not a healthy atmosphere for the growth of human
liberties. Extensive freedom during the medieval period existed only in
some of the towns. But even town liberty was corporate rather than
personal. A man possessed rights as a member of a class or a group,
like the gilds. The practice of setting down rights in charters like the
Magna Carta and town charters laid the basis for the later demand for
constitutions to safeguard and perpetuate liberties.

The age of Humanism during the Renaissance promoted the sense of
individuality, of the worth of man as man, thus providing a moral founda-
tion for the later struggle for the legal rights of individuals. The Pro-
testant revolution carried the emancipation further by proclaiming the
individual basis of worship and religious conscience. To be sure, indi-
vidual conscience had to be harmonized with the beliefs of the majority
in any Protestant sect and with the approved doctrines of the religion
supported by the state. But the theory was promulgated in the Protes-
tant revolution that the individual could go directly to God, according
to the dictates of his own conscience.

The circumstances which gave rise to our civil liberties were, however,
primarily associated with the Commercial Revolution, the rise of capi-
talism, the growth of the bourgeoisie and its desire to protect private
property and business rights. During the Middle Ages, the feudal lords
were ruthless enemies of the merchants, robbing and exploiting them
shamefully. Hence when the. kings turned against the barons in early
modern times, they found willing allies in the merchant class. It was not
long, however, before 'lie merchant class discovered that the kings were
as arbitrary and avaricious as the barons had been. They levied exces-
sive and arbitrary taxes, threw men into prison without trial, confiscated
property, and quartered soldiers in the merchants' homes.

Therefore, the bourgeoisie set about to overthrow arbitrary royal rule.
They had to have the right to carry on a campaign of propaganda in
order to promote their cause and gain followers. Thus, they became
ardent supporters of free speech, a free press, and the right of assemblage.
The sanctity of property rights furnished an argument against the prac-
tice of royal confiscation. Trial by jury would help to avert arbitrary
imprisonment, and the right of habeas corpus would save them from
rotting in jail at the pleasure of some king or autocrat. Freedom from
the quartering of soldiers in homes would remove one particularly ob-
noxious manifestation of royal arrogance and oppression. Since most of
the middle class were Protestants, often dissenting Protestants, they were
in danger of persecution by Catholics and Anglicans. Hence, they laid
much stress upon the virtues of religious liberty. Along with these spe-
cific goals went the more generalized ambition to create representative

294 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

government, so that arbitrary royal rule could be ended and the sov-
ereignty of the people made supreme.

Our civil liberties, then, were created on the basis of a set of class
interests and aspirations. Between the age of Elizabeth and the reign
of William and Mary — approximately a century — our fundamental civil
liberties were won in England.

The English middle class embodied their precious civil liberties in the
Bill of Rights of 1689, but the foundations of this "bill" rested upon a
number of English charters. First in point of time was the Magna -Carta
of 1215, a reactionary feudal document which was, fortunately, never
completely enforced. Misinterpreted in the seventeenth century by the
opponents of Stuart absolutism, it was elevated to the position of a
major shibboleth in the campaign for English civil liberties. Though
the Magna Carta had originally been wrested from the king by and for
the feudal lords, it was exploited by the seventeenth-century bourgeoisie
as a manifesto of the middle classes against the king and his lords.

More literally in harmony with later democracy was the legislation
of Edward I which confirmed the rights of Parliament in 1295-1297 and
made that body representative of the nobility, clergy, and burghers.
Henceforth, Parliament had a real right to voice the wishes of the realm.

A milestone in the struggle for civil liberties was the Petition of Right,
exacted from Charles I in 1628. It secured the promise that there
would be no further arbitrary taxation or confiscation of property, that
no freeman would be imprisoned without show of cause, that soldiers
would not be billeted in private homes, and that martial law would not
be used in time of peace. The famous Bushel case of 1670 and the Fox
Libel Act of 1792 strengthened the right of trial by jury. The Habeas
Corpus Act, passed in 1679, directed speedy trial and made it impossible
to hold a prisoner for more than twenty days without trial or bail. After
the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, most of the contents of earlier charters
of English liberties were, as we noted, collected in the famous Bill of
Rights of 1689. This Bill included the following important articles:

1. That the pretended power of suspending laws, or of execution of laws, by
regal authority without consent of parliament, is illegal.

2. That the pretended power of dispensing with laws, or the execution of laws,
by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal.

3. That the commission for erecting the late court of commissioners for eccle-
siastical causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal
and pernicious.

4. That levying money for or to the use of the crown by pretense of pre-
rogative, without grant of parliament, for longer time or in other manner than
the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.

5. That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commit-
ments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.

6. That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time
of peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is against law.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 295

7. That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense
suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.

8. That election of members of parliament ought to be free.

9. That the freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in parliament,
ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament.

10. That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed,
nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

11. That jurors ought to be duly impaneled and returned, and jurors which
pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders.

12. That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons
before conviction are illegal and void.

13. And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening,
and preserving of the laws, parliament ought to be held frequently.

The Bill of Rights was supplemented by the Toleration Act of 1689,
which extended civil and religious liberties to all save Catholics and Uni-
tarians; and by the Mutiny Act of the same year, which gave Parliament
control over appropriations for the army. Finally, in 1701, the Act of
Settlement gave Parliament power to dispose of the crown and to deter-
mine the line of succession.

The essentials of the English Bill of Rights were embodied in the state
constitutions of 11 of the 13 American commonwealths after the procla-
mation of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Then, at the in-
sistence of the Jeffcrsonian liberals, the same general list of liberties was
incorporated in our Federal Constitution, in the form of the first ten
amendments.

France adopted these English and American liberties in the Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man of 1789, and in the revolutionary charters and
constitutions which followed. In the nineteenth century, the heritage of
civil liberties was claimed by most European countries. Russia was a
notable exception.

Thus the bourgeoisie won those rights which at least hypothetically
deliver citizens of democratic countries from arbitrary imprisonment,
censorship and religious discrimination, and guarantee free speech, press,
and assemblage. In due time, the proletariat invoked the same civil
liberties in order to protect itself from the mercantile and industrial
classes and secure such rights as collective bargaining. Since, however,
employers usually controlled the governments of industrialized nations,
the proletariat has met with much difficulty in attaining equality with
the bourgeoisie in the enjoyment of the conventional civil liberties. As
Arthur W. Calhoun points out, the Supreme Court would not intervene to
save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti but it would eagerly have intervened
to protect a utility company in a small Massachusetts town from what
it regarded as a stringent state or municipal rate regulation.14 Indeed,

14 See above, p. 184.

296 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

the bourgeois civil liberties have frequently been utilized as a defense
against legislation designed to give the workers liberty and security. It
is a strange irony of history that the liberties established by seventeenth-
century merchants in England were invoked in twentieth-century America
to outlaw such things as child labor laws, minimum wage legislation, and
the right of labor to organize.

The fact that our conventional civil liberties were a bourgeois product,
designed primarily to protect private property and capitalistic enterprise,
helps to explain the attitude of Soviet Russia towards them. Americans
frequently wonder how Russians can submit to the extinction of these
liberties. The fact is that the Russians never enjoyed them and hardly
know what they mean. Under the tsars, the Russians had few civil
liberties. In spite of the revolution of 1905, the bourgeois movement in
Russia was not strong enough and did not endure long enough to promote
civil liberties. When the Marxian Bolsheviks came into power, in 1917,
they had no interest in establishing typically bourgeois legal devices and
safeguards. Russia thus skipped almost entirely the bourgeois stage of
civilization through its precipitous progress from quasi-feudalism to col-
lectivized industrialism in one generation. There is as little likelihood
that the Soviet rulers will ultimately establish all the bourgeois civil
liberties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as that they will
introduce other basic elements of bourgeois culture.

The mercantile classes were not content to have civil rights and guar-
anties of liberty enacted into statute law; they also wished to have them
written into constitutional law, since it is far more difficult for a govern-
ment to modify a constitution than to alter ordinary laws. This explains
the inordinate enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie for written constitutions in
the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The latter were
not the product of mass clamor for freedom and democracy, but the result
of bourgeois demands for an extreme form of protection of the liberties
which put their property rights, business practices, and religious beliefs
beyond the reach of the law.15

In time, the proletariat learned the same trick. Hence, in the first
proletarian constitution, that of Soviet Russia, we find the tables turned.
The Russian constitution, which outlaws capitalist ideals and practices,
is surrounded by the same halo of sanctity that envelops capitalistic
constitutions in other countries.

Contemporary Crisis of Civil Liberties. Mussolini has cynically re-
marked that liberty is a wasteful luxury. Hitler has made it an ex-
tremely dangerous luxury in Germany. But Americans must not be too
arrogant or contemptuous of totalitarian countries. If Italy and Ger-
many had a Supreme Court, which could set aside laws distasteful to
reactionary interests, they would not need to suppress legislatures. The
firm belief of Americans that the Federal Constitution protects them

See above, pp. 221 ff.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 297

comprehensively in all of their classic civil rights — freedom of speech,
religion, assembly, and so on — and guarantees them immunity from search
and seizure, summary justice, and discrimination before the law is but
one of their great illusions. The first ten amendments relate almost
wholly to prohibitions on the federal government. They do not, for the
most part, protect one against invasion of his rights by state legislation
and state officers. It is the Fourteenth Amendment which affords Amer-
ican citizens their main federal protection against arbitrary state action.

The value of this amendment to personal liberties has, however, been
exaggerated. The Supreme Court has been far more solicitous about
state encroachments upon property rights than over state violations of
personal liberties.

When the Court does take an interest, under the Fourteenth Amend-
ment, in intervening to protect personal liberties against violations by
the states, it can act only when these violations are executed by state
officials or embodied in state legislation. The history of the violations
of civil liberties shows, however, that the most frequent and serious viola-
tions of civil liberties are not official acts at all. They are violations
carried out by private forces and groups which the state will not act to
check. The Supreme Court holds itself and Congress to be powerless in
such cases. As stated by a lawyer, Osmond K. Fraenkel, in a compre-
hensive pamphlet "The Supreme Court and Civil Liberties," prepared for
the American Civil Liberties Union:

So long as the Court adheres to the principle of the Civil Rights Cases, Congress
can prohibit only official, not individual action; and its help to the cause of civil
liberties will .therefore be correspondingly limited. The greatest infringements
of personal rights come not from direct state action but from private forces
which the state is unwilling to check

The Supreme Court has come out boldly and dramatically in behalf
of civil liberties only once in our history. That was in the case of the
suspension of civil justice during the Civil War. But it did so a year
after the War was over and after the damage had been done. But its
pronouncement in the famous case of Ex Parte Milligan is worth re-
peating:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally
in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men,
at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious
consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any 01 its pro-
visions can be suspended during any of the grdat exigencies of government.

Yet, when the World War came along, when the Red scare followed
the War, and when Prohibition was highly popular, the Court forgot both
letter and spirit of the Milligan decision. The following summary of
characteristic violations of civil liberties in the United States since the
World War, prepared a few years ago by Lowell Mellett, Ludwell Denny,

298 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

and Ruth Finney will show that there is ample reason for American
friends of civil liberties to arouse themselves:

LAWS AND COURT DECISIONS DESTROYING CIVIL LIBERTIES

By U. S. Supreme Court :

Sustaining right of Congress to penalize expressions of opinions.
Sustaining right of Post Office to bar publications from mail.
Sustaining state syndicalism laws making mere opinions crimes.
Denying citizenship to alien pacifists.
Limiting labor's right to picket.
Sustaining "yellow dog contract."
Permitting tapping of telephones to secure evidence.
Holding unconstitutional state laws abolishing anti-labor injunction.

By Labor Department, with authority of Congress:
Forbidding entry of aliens holding unorthodox moral or political views.
Deporting aliens holding unorthodox moral or political views.

By Post Office Department, with authority of Congress:

Barring from mails matter "held to be" obscene or defamatory.
Prohibiting dissemination of birth-control information.

Barring under a section of the war-time Espionage Act still in force, during
peace time, all matter "held to be" seditious.

By Customs officials:

Power to seize imported literature which they hold to be obscene or seditious.

By Radio Commission:
Controlling establishment and conduct of radio stations.

By Federal Courts:

Power to issue injunctions violating the rights of labor to strike and picket.
Power to imprison for contempt of court those who publish criticisms of a
judge's action on pending issues.

By State Department:

Refusal of visas to aliens whose political views are held objectionable.
Refusal of passports for travel to American citizens whose views or activities
are objectionable.

State Governments:

Defining sedition, criminal syndicalism and criminal anarchy — 32 states.

Punishing display of red flag — 28 states.

Old laws of reconstruction days in the South punishing incitements to insur-
rection and rebellion (used recently against strikers and communists).

Power of governors to send militia into strike areas and without martial law
to suspend civil rights.

State police systems in 20 states, frequently used to curtail labor's rights.

Power of state courts to issue injunctions suspending civil liberties of labor,
and to jail for contempt for published criticisms of issues pending before
a court.

Teaching evolution — prohibited m three states.

Requiring or permitting reading of the Bible in public schools in 17 states.

Prohibiting atneists from testifying in court or holding office, six states.

Preventing Negroes from voting, in 10 states.

Laws punishing "enticement" of Negroes from their employment, passed in
southern states to obstruct migration to the North.

Segregating Negroes in schools or in public conveyances, 17 states.

Censorship of movies, six states.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 299

Defining the crime of obscenity — all states.

Making a crime of giving information on birth control, 13 states.

Violating the traditional rights of defendants in criminal cases — among them,
for example, by laws permitting juries to return verdicts on three-quarter
vote, compelling defendants to testify, and denying jury trials even in serious
cases carrying long sentences in prison.

Unique in a jew states are:

Coal and iron police.

Private employment of publicly deputized sheriffs.

Power of sheriffs to issue proclamations suspending civil liberties in "emer-
gencies."

Power given to judges to enjoin publication of newspapers held to be
"scurrilous or defamatory."

Municipal Legislation:

Police exercise wide discretion in denying freedom of speech, press and

meetings; controlling picketing.
Requiring permits for meetings in private halls.

In addition to the above-mentioned specific provisions of the law interefering
with civil liberties are:

Decisions of many courts denying to aliens the same civil liberties as citizens;
Unequal civil rights of women with men in most states;
Denial of civil rights to Indians, despite their admission to citizenship;
Various devices by which Negroes are kept off juries; held in practical peonage

for debt;
Denial of civil liberties by various devices in the American colonies (Philippines,

Porto Rico, Virgin Islands).

Some of these abuses have since been corrected in part and new forms
of intolerance have appeared since this summary was prepared, but the
general picture remains essentially as outlined. We may illustrate a little
more completely the invasions, and attempted invasions, of American
civil liberties in the twentieth century.

Our country was founded on a two-fold revolution — the Revolutionary
War and the legal revolution carried through by the members of the
Constitutional Convention of 1787 who exceeded their instructions. Our
leaders, down through the time of Abraham Lincoln, prided themselves
upon our revolutionary tradition. Even so conservative a person as
John Adams once stated that no people should regard themselves at fit
for self-government unless they had carried through at least one suc-
cessful revolution. Jefferson held that we should have very frequent
revolutions, in order to clear the political atmosphere and fertilize the tree
of liberty by the blood of tyrants. Today, there is a different attitude.
At the close of the first World War, Benjamin Gitlow was convicted in
New York state for uttering Jeffersonian doctrines and his conviction was
upheld by the Supreme Court. As we have seen, some 32 states have
passed criminal syndicalism laws outlawing revolution. Even so liberal
a federal judge as John Munro Woolsey, noted for his broadmindedness
in censorship cases, upheld the Post Office ban on the radical periodical,
The Revolutionary Age, on the ground that it advocated revolution. The
Daughters of the American Revolution placed the famous preacher, Harry

300 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

Emerson Fosdick, on their blacklist because he used the word "revolu-
tion" in one of his sermons. Some of the Southern states have revived
old slavery statutes which impose the death penalty for revolutionary
doctrines.

Nor were we especially afraid of economic radicalism in former days.
Patrick Henry and his associates frequently denounced "the rich and the
well-born/' and declared that the Constitution represented an attempt
to deprive the people of their liberties. Abraham Lincoln stated that the
economic bond joining together the working-class of the world is the
strongest and most sacred sentiment to be found in human life, with the
sole exception of family relationships. This is a thoroughly Marxian
sentiment. But we have been greatly worried about economic radicals
since the first World War. Injunctions against labor have been extremely
frequent and sweeping. Even peaceful picketing has been outlawed by
many injunctions. The Supreme Court long upheld "yellow dog" con-
tracts. Contempt procedure in injunction cases denies labor the right
of trial by jury.

Wo have already referred to the many criminal syndicalism laws which
outlaw Communists and other radical revolutionaries, such as the I.W.W.,
and the fact that it is a felony in 28 states to fly a red flag. In other states
it is a crime to possess radical literature. Such cases as those of Angelo
Herndon and Marcus Graham turned about this point. Repeated efforts
have been made to put a ban on the Communist party and keep it off the
ballot. Employers have been permitted to keep private police, which
have defied the law and intimidated laborers in wholesale fashion. This
abuse was particularly notable in Pennsylvania, where industrial and
mining districts were dominated by the notorious Coal and Iron Police.16
Some of these abuses have been mitigated by the Wagner Labor Relations
act, the Norris-La Guardia act, restricting the freedom of federal judges
in granting restrictions against labor, and in certain liberal Supreme
Court decisions relative to convictions under the criminal syndicalism
and red flag laws. But an ominous precedent has already been set, which
could be easily revived by a reactionary administration.

In President Roosevelt's administration the persecution of Communists
has eased off but local violence against labor unionism has been revived.
This form of local vigilantism was well illustrated by the procedure in
the Little -Steel Strike of 1937, and particularly by the Chicago massacre
in May, 1937. This showed that, even under a federal administration
sympathetic with the program of equal rights for labor, local authorities
can develop a most menacing campaign of opposition and violence. A
senatorial committee, headed by Senator Robert M. LaFollette, carried
on extensive investigations, beginning in 1936, and revealed that a large
amount of industrial espionage was being carried on among union workers
by employers, who paid large sums of money to private detective agencies
to spy on unionists, foment violence, and in other ways discredit the

1<JSee J. P. Shalloo, Private Police, Annals of the American Academy, 1933.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 301

labor movement. The exposure had at least a temporarily beneficial
effect in discouraging wholesale industrial espionage.

The United States once prided itself upon the right of asylum. George
Washington, as President, protected "Citizen" Genet against his enemies
in France, though Genet had flagrantly defied Washington's neutrality
proclamation and other presidential policies. Since the World War, how-
ever, we have shown apprehensiveness lest we be harmed or contaminated
by admitting to our shores persons with too progressive ideas. The height
of this absurdity was reached in the case of Count Michael Karolyi, a
distinguished Austro-Hungarian nobleman, who was for years denied
entry to the United States because he held mildly socialistic doctrines
and had favored legislation breaking up the great Hungarian estates.
English labor leaders have been prevented from landing here because they
entertained a friendly regard for Soviet Russia. Even in President
Roosevelt's administration, the distinguished English publicist, John
Strachey, was compelled to cut short his lecture trip and return to England
because of radical views. Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was allowed to
return to the country only temporarily to vist friends and relatives, with
the stipulation that she make no public address. In the days of President
Jefferson, if we may judge by well-known instances of his procedure, such
persons as Count Karolyi, John Strachey and Emma Goldman, would not
only have been admitted freely to the country but would have been
promptly invited to the White House for conference and a discussion on
the state of the world. It is worthy of note that, prior to the second World
War no person had been even momentarily delayed in entering the
United States because he entertained extremely reactionary opinions.
Anti-republican views have been no bar to entry to this republic.

Pacifism was at one time extremely respectable. Jefferson expressed
such convictions with great vigor. The famous Massachusetts Senator,
Charles Sumner, once stated that there had never been a good war or a
bad peace. But the federal Congress and courts have taken a different
attitude in our day. Citizenship has been denied to highly intelligent
persons, including some who showed great bravery on the Allied front
during the World War, because they would not agree to bear arms under
any and all conditions in the event of another war. This reached its
reductio ad absurdum in the case of Madame Rosika Schwimmer, an
elderly and cultured lady, utterly incapable of bearing arms in any
military situation. Other notorious instances of this sort were the Mac-
intosh and Bland cases. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rebuked his
conservative brethren on the Supreme Court by contending that they
presumed to deny citizenship to those who take the Sermon on the Mount
seriously. But the Court remained adamant, and pacifists are not re-
garded as suitable material* for American citizenship.

Despite the fact that we had no legislation suppressing freedom in
regard to sex candor until after the Civil War, there has since been a
remarkable development of repressive legislation and procedure in this
field. The Comstock laws outlawed birth-control information, and state

302 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

legislation of a similar sort has been widespread. There has been much
extreme state legislation condemning what has been regarded as lewd
and lascivious books, pictures, plays and the like. Books have been sup-
pressed by the Post Office authorities and the Customs officials. Theatres
have been padlocked, in violation of the right of a jury trial. Vice squads
have freely defied the legislation and court procedure regulating the
right of visit and search. A rigorous sex censorship is exerted over
moving-pictures. The Countess Cathcart and others have been denied
entry to the country because their moral code did not square with that
of Anthony Comstock, John S. Sumner, and the New York Society for
the Suppression of Vice. Liberal court decisions have recently relieved
somewhat this situation in the field of sex censorship and obscurantism.
But in states like Massachusetts, where there is a strong Catholic in-
fluence, a persistent attempt has been made to invoke existing obscenity
statutes and to pass new obscenity legislation directed against radical
literature, which may have no relation whatsoever to sex and moral sub-
jects. Communist literature would be classed with pornography in such
laws.

Academic freedom is still frequently violated,17 two notable cases being
those of Professor Ralph Turner of the University of Pittsburgh and
Jerome Davis of Yale University, very able teachers who were turned out
because of mildly progressive economic and social views. There is no
instance on record of a college professor being dismissed for ultra-
reactionary opinions. The latter are more likely to win a promotion
for the professor, even to the presidency of his institution.

Perhaps the most ominous case of the violation of academic freedom
in American academic history was that of Bertrand Russell.18 The dis-
tinguished British baron and philosopher was appointed to a professorship
of philosophy in the College of the City of New York in 1940. Imme-
diately, an impassioned protest was made by Bishop Manning of the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After much acrimonious discussion,
a woman taxpayer brought suit to prevent Professor Russell from taking
his post. Her motion was granted and Russell was barred, though he was
supported by a majority of the Board of Higher Eduation. The Court
of Appeals of New York State denied Russell's appeal. The menacing
character of this procedure was emphasized by Chancellor Harry Wood-
burn Chase of New York University in a letter to The New York Times:

However much one may disagree with the Russell appointment, however
repugnant one may find his opinions, the basic fact remains that, if the juris-
diction of the court is upheld, a blow has been struck at the security and in-
tellectual independence of every faculty member in every public college and uni-
versity in the United States. Its potential consequences are incalculable.

Remember we are dealing with opinions. If a southern court on a taxpayer's
suit can dismiss a state university professor because of his opinions on racial
matters; if a midwestern judge can declare a university chair vacant because of
its occupant's heretical opinions on agriculture; or a western court can take

i'See below, pp. 784 ff.

18 See John Dcwey and H. M. Kallen, The Bertrand Russell Case, Day, 1941.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 303

cognizance of faculty attitude toward the Townsend plan — then indeed we have
taken a long step toward the regimentation of our public institutions.19

We have already noted that revolutionary publications are frequently
put under the ban of either legislation or Post Office regulations. In
order to protect the freedom of the press, the Chicago Tribune waged an
expensive battle to prevent the suppression of a scandal sheet in Minne-
apolis, but no paper of comparable repute has ever raised its finger
against wholesale suppression of radical papers.

The most impressive challenge to American civil liberties before the
outbreak of the second World War was probably the creation of a Con-
gressional Committee under Congressman Martin Dies of Texas to
investigate "un-American activities." The threat to American liberty
contained in the activities of this Committee has been presented by the
distinguished educator, William H. Kilpatrick, in an article "The Dies
Committee and True Americanism," in Frontiers of Democracy for Janu-
ary 15, 1940.

In the first place, the Dies Committee has failed to remember that it
was appointed to investigate un-American activities and not "un-Ameri-
can opinions." This is a distinction of capital importance. The right to
hold any opinion, however conservative or radical, is the essence of Amer-
icanism. Congressman Dies has as much right to his opinions as Earl
Browder, and vice versa. Any person or group of persons is "free to pro-
pose and advocate any change in our government or other institutions,
however radical or sweeping." To oppose this freedom of opinion is
obviously un-American, and it has been so recognized from Jefferson and
Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Jefferson was a
passionate' republican, but he advocated complete freedom of speech
and opinion for those who wished to set up a monarchy here.

It is always essential to keep clearly in mind the fact that the American
doctrine of free thought and speech means freedom of expression for those
whom we dislike and with whom we disagree. The Holy Inquisition,
Ivan the Terrible, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Bismarck, Mussolini, Hitler,
Stalin, Diaz, and the Mikado have all permitted freedom of expression
for those who agreed with them. As the late Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes put it: "If there is any principle of the Constitution that more
imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free
thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for
the thought we hate."

Dr. Kilpatrick finds that truly un-American activities are those which
interfere with orderly discussion and voting and direct allegiance to
powers outside the United States. He lists five groups which engage in
distinctly un-American activities: (1) those which sow hatred of group
against group upon the basis of race, religion, economic status, and the
like; (2) groups that practice deceit and dishonesty in their relations with

1° The New York Times, April 20, 1940. "From The Bertrand Russell Case edited
by John Dewey and Horace M. Kallen. Copyright 1941. By permission of The
Viking Press, Inc. of New York."

304 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

others; (3) groups which acknowledge allegiance to authorities outside the
United States (these are not limited to Communists) ; (4) groups which
deliberately sow dissension in social organizations to exploit them for
their own benefit; and (5) groups — vested interests — so firmly wedded
to things as they are that they resist, by force if necessary, the study and
discussion of existing social institutions. It is interesting that, while
the totalitarian revolutions have sprung from the stupid reactionary re-
sistance of the last group to orderly and gradual change, the Dies Com-
mittee has never summoned to Washington any leading representative of
such reactionaries for examination and exposure.

According to Kilpatrick, certain items in Mr. Dies' activities require
special criticism; (1) the "smearing" of the public reputation of public
men and movements without adequate evidence and without opportunity
for rebuttal; (2) the outrageous implication that those on the Washington
mailing list of the League for Peace and Democracy were Communists;
(3) Mr. Thomas1 comparable charge of Communism against prominent
Washington officials; and (4) giving to J. B. Matthews, an ex-radical,
a public aura in which to give vent to his private grouches against certain
consumer organizations.

It is well to remember, Dr. Kilpatrick concludes, that "most of these
so-called un-American practices [of radicals] have their root in economic
distress and inequalities. We shall never have true Americanism, in any
full sense, until we can remedy the unjust inequalities of an outmoded
economic system."* Dr. Kilpatrick does not object to a Congressional
committee to investigate un-American activities, provided it sticks to
activities. But he does not think Mr. Dies is the man for the job: "If
the work is to be continued it should be under other management. If
there is more work to be done, Mr. Dies is not the one to do it." 20

It was one of the colossal ironies of democratic politics that the same
Congress which voted billions in 1942 to help us spread the Four Freedoms
throughout the world also made a large appropriation to enable Mr. Dies
to continue his reactionary inquisition. Mr. Dies' effort to "smear" 35
members of the Board of Economic Warfare as "Reds" and "fellow trav-
elers" in the spring of 1942 led to a sharp rebuke by Vice President
Wallace, as reported in Time of April 6, 1942:

If Mr. Dies were genuinely interested in helping our war effort he would have
discussed this matter with me as soon as it came to his attention. He did not ;
rather, he is seeking to inflame the public mind by a malicious distortion of facts
which he did not want to check with me. If we were at peace, these tactics might
be overlooked as the product of a witchcraft mind. . . . The doubts and anger
which this and similar statements of Mr. Dies tend to arouse in the public mind
might as well come from Goebbels himself so far as their practical effect is con-
cerned. . . . The effect on our morale would be less damaging if Mr. Dies were
on the Hitler payroll.

20 For another excellent analysis of the work of the Dies Committee, see the
Institute for Propaganda Analysis Bulletin, "Mr. Dies Goes to Town," January 15,
1940; and "Help Stop the Dies Committee," American Civil Liberties Union, Janu-
ary, 1941.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 305

It is an interesting commentary upon our regard for civil liberties in
the United States that a self-constituted and self-supporting organization,
the American Civil Liberties Union, had to be brought into existence to
prevent Americans from depriving themselves of the very liberties for
which our revolutionary forefathers fought and bled. It was created by
Roger Baldwin at the close of the first World War, when an unprecedented
wave of intolerance and official lawlessness swept the country. It has
even had to labor strenuously to save the "principles of 76" from the
Daughters of the American Revolution. American citizens have been
notoriously lax and indifferent with respect to their historic rights. Had
it not been for the activities of the American Civil Liberties Union, we
would be far closer to the conditions which prevail in Germany and Italy
than we now are. The occurrences since the first World War have served
to emphasize more strikingly than ever before that the price of liberty
is, veritably, eternal vigilance.

The capitalist crisis and the challenge offered to capitalism by the
industrial proletariat have thus brought liberty into jeopardy throughout
the western world as in no previous time in the present century. This
fact is presented in eloquent and authoritative fashion by Harold J.
Laski in his article "Liberty in an Insecure World" in the Survey
Graphic. He points out in colorful fashion the alarming developments
of the last decade or so:

What H. G. Wells has termed the "raucous voices" seem able, over vast areas
of mankind, to dragoon men to their will. They dismiss freedom of thought as
worthless. They forbid freedom of association. The normal rule of law is bent
to the service of their arbitrary discretion. They refuse respect to interna-
tional obligation. They impose restrictions, unthinkable a generation ago, upon
freedom of movement. They abandon ideals of social reform and individual
happiness in the search, at any cost, for power. They have revived the law of
hostages. They have been guilty of cruelties so gross, of infamies so unspeakable,
that ordinary men have bowed their heads in shame at the very mention of their
crimes. In a sense, far more profound than any to which Louis XIV or Napoleon
could venture to claim, they have exacted an admission that they are the state;
and they have compelled a worship of, and a service to, its compulsions unknown
in western civilization since the Dark Ages." 21

This was the condition even before 1939 in Germany, Italy, and other
fascist states, which occupy a considerable portion of continental Europe
outside of Russia. And even in Russia, democracy and liberty fared
little better than in fascist states. In the major democratic states before
1939 — France, Great Britain and the United States — there were ominous
signs of the impending suppression of freedom. The social reforms of
the Popular Front under Leon Blum, together with the financial and
international crises, placed liberty in jeopardy through the incitement
furnished to reactionary forces. In England, in the fifteen years before
the second World War, there was the most alarming symptoms of reaction
to occur there in a century — the solidification of Tory political power,

Laski, loc. cit., October, November, 1937.

306 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

the 1927 legislation hostile to labor, the Incitement to Disaffection Act
of 1934, the militarization of the police, the savage sentences imposed
upon striking miners, and the imprisonment of Tom Mann. In the
United States, the very moderate efforts of the Roosevelt administration
to reform and preserve capitalism raised even the leading beneficiaries
of the Roosevelt program to a pitch of fury against their benefactor.
What may happen, if really sweeping reforms are proposed, is, as Pro-
fessor Laski observes, appalling to consider:

Anyone who reads the record of the American labor spy, of the activities of
hired armies of thugs employed by business men in industrial disputes, of the
gigantic scale upon which tax evasion is practiced by eminent financial leaders,
of the opposition of college presidents and Cardinals to such elementary decencies
as the prohibition of child labor, will wonder exactly what habits American capi-
talism will display if and when its authority is seriously challenged.2-

The major cause of this tidal wave of reaction against freedom and
democracy is the threat to capitalism involved in social reforms which
democracy makes possible. The capitalists were willing to make some
concessions in the way of reform in a period of capitalistic expansion and
growth. In an age of capitalistic maturity and contraction, reforms have
placed unrepentant capitalism in greater jeopardy, and its defense-
mechanism is the current war on liberty and the suppression of democracy.
While we need to watch the rabble-rousers, it is the Economic Royalists
who constitute the major enemies of the American system of freedom and
democracy.

Much more menacing, however, than any prewar capitalistic alarm
and reaction is the outbreak of the second World War. This has meant
totalitarian expansion, the inauguration of totalitarianism in France, the
establishment of wartime censorship everywhere, the threat of the ulti-
mate extinction of civil liberty in the Old World, and extensive limitations
on liberty in the New World.

The Crisis in Liberty. To those who consider historical facts and have
a sound historical perspective there is little cause for surprise that liberty
-may be going into eclipse. Only the middle class, or bourgeoisie, have
ever had any great regard for liberty, and this middle class is now losing
its dominant position in society. The laboring classes have had little
interest in liberty, except insofar as it meant freedom to unionize. The
individualism of the pioneer farmer is disappearing in the face of the
farm crisis and the craving for government subsidies. There is no liberty-
loving background in the cultural tradition of those who are fashioning
our totalitarian states. Unless the middle-class love of liberty is
espoused by those groups and classes in whose hands the future resides,
our civil liberties, as we have known them in the past, are certainly
doomed. The destruction of our middle classes by the economic strains
of warfare will leave us without even that tottering bulwark of liberty
which we possess today.

22 Laski, loc. cit.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 307

Many thoughtful persons contend that, since the United States has
entered the second World War, we shall set up wartime totalitarianism,
which is likely to be continued long after peace is made. But it is
usually taken for granted that our fascism will be of a nice kindly type —
and exercise a benevolent authority.

We have been warned against any such "pipe dreams" by E. B. Ashton
and Sinclair Lewis, both of whom have suggested that the American
totalitarianism will be more cruel and brutal than any European brand
thus far known. This timely warning is emphasized by Stewart H. Hoi-
brook in an article on "Our Tradition of Violence" in The American
Mercury:23

For some years we Americans have been reveling in a rather superior smug-
ness. Viewing the various species of savagery in Europe and Asia, we speak
complacently about the foreign barbarians slipping back to medievalism; about
the Dark Ages again settling down over the world — except, of course, in these
United States. What has been going on beyond our borders is enough to
make anyone shudder, it is true. But it need scarcely evoke feelings of superi-
ority in a country which has had KKK's, Molly Muguires, Black Legions, Ludlow
massacres, Palmer raids, and countless mobs of vigilantes in its history, if not
on its conscience. In sober fact, no race of people on earth has gone in so
joyfully and efficiently for violence as the residents of these United States of
America. Ours is an amazing record.

Most of our land was taken by conquest: "To begin with, most of our
land was got in the manner of the Huns, Italians, Japanese, British, and
French; that is, we took it forcibly and with a maximum of bloodshed
from a weaker people." After we had seized the land on which we lived,
we developed the habit of taking the law into our own hands: "Once we
had the land, we went into an era of mob-law. The habit stuck: we are
still inclined to take the 'law' into our own hands."

For generations we warred against the Indians. Then, for other
generations, the frontier was ruled all too commonly by mobsters and
vigilantes. The spirit was well expressed in the old slogan that "there is
more law in a six-shooter than in all the law books." This sort of mob
rule reached its extreme in the various gold rushes — to California, Mon-
tana, and Alaska.

During the Civil War occurred the most systematic and widespread
rioting in our history, most striking being the draft riots in New York
City. Over 1,500 were killed, many more wounded, and a vast amount
of property destroyed. After the Civil War, the violence continued in
the Reconstruction era. Southern Negroes and northern carpetbaggers
led a reign of terror in the South, which was answered by the defensive
violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

When this epoch of violence was ended, the war between capital and
labor began. We had the terrorism of the "Molly Maguires" in Penn-
sylvania ; the railroad riots of the late 70's ; the Homestead battle in the
steel area of Pittsburgh; the riots in the western mining regions; the

23 November, 1939.

308 DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

bombing of the Los Angeles Times; the great strikes at Lawrence and
Patterson; the use of detective armies and coal and iron police; and the
war on the I.W.W. that lasted into the first World War, to mention only
a few of the striking examples of this form of warfare and violence. The
first World War stimulated mob action on a vast scale. At its close,
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a reign of terror which
made peacetime Germany under the Kaiser seem "a sweet land of lib-
erty.'*

After the war was over, Prohibition encouraged lawlessness, both in
enforcing and in evading the law. It also launched upon their careers
the racketeers and gangsters who have created a new era of lawlessness
and violence. In the last twenty-five years police strikes, strikes in coal
and steel, race riots, lynchings, strike-breaking, the revival of the Klan,
and the golden age of racketeers have amply proved that American vio-
lence did not end with the termination of the frontier. All this — and a
great deal more could be listed of like character — emphasizes the desira-
bility of solving our domestic problems by democratic methods. If and
when American Fascism does come, it is likely to write a new chapter in
American lawlessness which will make the antics of the frontier vigilantes
seem like peaceful picnics. Mr. Holbrook concludes:

In short, Americans have no reason to be smug about the foreign barbarians.
God help Uncle Sam and those cool, calm whiskers of his if a sizeable American
mob ever finds its Man on Horseback! We have a long and lusty tradition of
violence. The paranoiac supermen in our midst, those who would inflame hatreds
and shatter the structure of civilized legality, are the more dangerous for that
reason. If the dreaded moment comes, the doings of the sissy French in '89,
the Russians in 1917, and the Nazi Germans in 1933, will look like kindergarten
brawls by comparison. We Americans have got what it takes.24

24 For a brilliant statement of the probable stimulation of American Fascism by the
.second World War, see W. H. Chamberlin, "War— Shortcut to Fascism," in The
American Mercury, December, 1940.

CHAPTER X
War as a Social Institution

How War Complicates National Problems

BY 1941 THE nations of the world were locked in the most desperate war
of all human history. Our own country entered the conflict, fighting a
"war against war" and "a war to end war." It was plain that we could
not battle with complete understanding and enthusiasm unless we compre-
hended the extent to which war menaces orderly civilization and decency.
We must fight a war, but we would fail in our purpose if we gradually
come to believe that war is a good in itself. Such a philosophy is the ideal
of the aggressor nations that attacked us. For us to espouse it would
mean that they had really conquered us, even though we might overcome
them on the battlefield.

When we fully understand how great a challenge war is to human
culture and security, we shall be the more willing to make the sacrifices
needed to root it out of human experience and the less likely to capitulate
to the enemy dogma that war is a noble pursuit that brings out all the
best qualities of mankind. We shall then be able to understand the
nobility of a crusade to end war and be better able to keep the present
World War devoted to this goal.

The lag between our machines and our domestic social institutions con-
stitutes enough of a problem for man to solve in our generation without
having the situation further complicated by war. Our social thinking is
slow enough even when not handicapped by the mob mentality that domi-
nates public attitudes in war time, and our democracy and party gov-
ernment are already inadequate. However, man might have muddled
through his present difficulties and secured a fairly efficient utilization of
his technological equipment if the second World War had been averted.

In many ways, war and preparation for war complicate the social scene
and obstruct social progress. As we have already seen, even in normal
times, from half to three-quarters of the budgets of modern states are
absorbed in some direct or indirect form of military expense. In 1938,
the nations of the world spent over $17,000,000,000 in armaments, getting
ready for the second World War. The United States appropriated bil-
lions more for defense in 1941 than was involved in the total outlay for
relief of all forms between 1933 and 1940. These expenditures for war
activities leave little in the treasury for social insurance, public works,

309

310 WAR AND PEACE

education, and so on. And war finances threaten the credit and financial
integrity of any state.

Further, war upsets social reforms and can destroy the results of years
of patient and constructive statesmanship. A good example is what the
first World War did to the program of the Liberal party and to the
remarkable achievements of England in the way of orderly social progress
and efficient democracy from 1905 to 1914. An equally good example is
the memory of what happened to Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom"
when Wilson was beguiled into entering the World War in 1917. Domes-
tic reform stopped forthwith. Leading plutocrats who had been deliber-
ately excluded from the White House prior to 1917 were thereafter called
into frequent consultation and were given key positions in the wartime
government. What had been an ultra-liberal administration ended in
the reactionary and oppressive orgy conducted by Attorney General A.
Mitchell Palmer, which made the Alien and Sedition laws of John Adams'
time seem almost like a venture in civil liberties.

Many competent observers believed that a second World War would
mean the end of private capitalism and democratic government through-
out the civilized world. To them it seemed possible that our system
of society would be followed by a more just and efficient regime of
production for use and of social democracy. But this was no more than
wishful thinking. In any event, such a happy result would be gained only
with much loss of life and money. The second World War might well be
followed by a peace settlement even more stupid and short-sighted than
that of Versailles, thus heading the world for a third World War. Or the
second World War might be followed by rather interminable chaos and
the extinction of civilization, as we now know it. The elaborate machines
which are our main claim to a superior civilization will not save us unless
they can be made to serve rather than to destroy mankind. When the
second World War began, mankind faced a future more unpredictable and
more ominous than at any other time in the experience of humanity.

The demands of war on the United States are appalling. At the outset
of our national government, in 1789, our annual expenditures for defense
were $632,000. Even in 1810, when we were in danger of war with both
France and England, we spent only $4,000,000 annually. In the middle
of the nineteenth century, our annual defense appropriation was less than
$20,000,000. By 1880, it had increased to $51,000,000. A new high level
was reached in 1900 when the defense budget mounted to $190,000,000.
On the eve of the World War, in 1913, it had jumped to $335,000,000. By
1930, the figure was $702,000,000, and in 1938 it was well in excess of
$1,000,000,000. We were then spending more than any other country
except Soviet Russia and Germany. Between June, 1940, and April,
1942, Congress appropriated over 160 billion dollars for armaments.

Those groups who were most critical of the modest New Deal expendi-
tures for humanitarian purposes had nothing but praise for our war
budget in 1941 and 1942, and some spokesmen of reactionary groups held
that it should be far larger.

WAR AND PEACE 311

Outstanding Phases of the Evolution of Warfare

Changing Methods and Techniques of Warfare. Man came upon
the scene of recorded history already well experienced in warfare and
armed with flint-pointed javelins, bows and arrows, stone axes, and other
fairly formidable weapons. The early Egyptians, Sumerians, and Baby-
lonians gave us our first metallic weapons, of copper and bronze. Mak-
ing use of organized governments, they brought mass warfare into exist-
ence. Greater mobility in war came when the Kassites brought in the
horse, about 2000 B.C., from the grassy plateau to the east of Mesopo-
tamia. This occasioned the first appearance of cavalry in warfare.
When the horse was attached to the chariot, this brought into existence
what constituted the "artillery" until the invention of gunpowder in early
modern times. The cavalry and chariots made possible the conquests
that led to the establishment of the impressive Egyptian and Babylonian
empires.

A great forward step in military history of the ancient Orient was the
invention of iron weapons, probably by the Hittites of Anatolia in the
fourteenth century B.C. The Hittites built up an impressive temporary
empire, but even more important were the Assyrian conquests, which were
due as much to iron weapons as to the military prowess of Assyrian
soldiers. Their army was made up of heavy and light infantry, cavalry,
and an engineer corps. Armor was fairly well developed. The chariots
charged in line as a sort of movable fort, and in certain ways were the
forerunners of our tanks. In fact, the Assyrians actually worked out the
principles of the modern tank, or armored battle car. The Assyrian
military engineers contributed much to the science of sieges. Their
battering-rams crumbled the brick walls which surrounded the cities of the
ancient East. The fierce, efficient warfare of the Assyrians became a
tradition which has lasted to our time. The brutality of the Assyrians,
in battle and in their treatment of captives, has rarely been equaled.
More than any other people down to their time, the Assyrians developed
mass warfare by conscripting a considerable portion of the vigorous and
warlike peasants who formed the backbone of the Assyrian state.

In ancient Greece the Spartans developed the military psychology and
the military cult more thoroughly than any other people known before the
Greek age. The whole culture of Sparta was subordinated to the produc-
tion of brave, well-trained soldiers. Valor in warfare was the supreme
personal virtue and social achievement. Perhaps it was only their limited
number that kept the Spartans from developing a vast empire. As it was,
the great contribution to conquering warfare during the Greek age was
made by two kings of Macedonia, a Balkan state lying to the north of
Thessaly. This region was inhabited by a hardy and warlike people
much given to horsemanship.

The triumph of Philip and Alexander over the Greeks and then that of
Alexander over the armies of the Orient were due to military methods

312 WAR AND PEACE

introduced by Philip. Having plenty of horses and warriors, he made the
cavalry an important unit in his plan of battle. He curbed their former
undisciplined fighting and drilled them thoroughly to advance in a close
mass upon the enemy. Even more important was the creation of the
famous Macedonian phalanx — a dense mass of infantry armed with
eighteen-foot spears which moved irresistibly forward against the enemy.
Ranks were eight men deep. The pikes carried by the last line extended
even with the front line, thus making an ideal offensive presentation for
shock tactics. Philip worked out a military scheme that placed his
massed cavalry on each wing of the phalanx, so that cavalry and infantry
operated as a single impressive unit. With this military machine Philip
crushed the Greeks and Alexander defeated the forces of the oriental
monarchs, in spite of great numerical odds against him. The Macedonian
army was the finest fighting organization from the days of the great
Assyrian warrior-kings until the armies of the conquering Romans.

Home, with consistently effective military methods, conquered most of
the known world. The basic unit in the Roman army was the legion, of
approximately 3,000 men. Increased to about 6,000 men by the cavalry
and light-armed auxiliaries, it formed a brigade. The brigade was di-
vided into thirty companies, each made up of two "centuries" of 100 men
each.

At first the Roman infantry operated in phalanx formation, much as
the Macedonian had done. The defects of this formation were revealed
in the wars against Pyrrhus of Epirus and his fighting elephants in the
third century B.C. The Roman army then was gradually adapted to
fighting in open formation, and with this plan of battle the legions con-
quered the world. In battle, the Roman army advanced in three lines, in
each of which the ranks were eight deep. The third line was usually held
in reserve. When a small force of Romans was attacked by superior
numbers, the Roman soldiers were usually arranged in a semicircle or a
full circle, so they could face the enemy on all sides. The very flexible
open formation could be shifted to meet special circumstances; for ex-
ample, it could be moved apart to allow fighting elephants to pass through
with little damage. Against a close-formed phalanx, elephants were very
deadly.

The main weapon of the Roman infantry was the two-edged sword, used
for cutting and thrusting. Javelins and often slings were also widely
used. The front ranks hurled javelins at the enemy and then closed in
with their swords. Then the rear ranks threw javelins into the enemy
ranks over the heads of the front Roman lines, who were engaged in
sword fighting. The infantry was protected by metal and leather armor,
which covered tho body and part of the legs. Infantrymen wore sturdy
helmets and carried metal and leather shields. The cavalry was armed
with long lances, javelins, and long swords. After Marius's time the
Roman cavalry was recruited mainly from foreign mercenaries.

Most Roman warfare was aggressive, for an enemy commander could
rarely be induced to attack a fortified Roman camp. Heavy loss was

WAR AND PEACE 313

inevitable if a Roman camp was assaulted, and the Romans never stopped
even for a single night without fortifying their camp. The layout of their
camps was derived from the early pile villages of the Terremare peoples of
northern Italy. The Romans were also very effective in siege warfare.
They would build a covered terrace up to the walls of the beleaguered city
and then move in the battering-rams. They also built towers against
the walls from which javelins, stones, and other missiles could be hurled
into the city, and often used catapults to hurl larger stones against the
walls.

The two major drawbacks to Roman warfare, especially in early days,
came from politics and religion. The commanders under the Republic
owed their position to political rank rather than military ability, and
armies were sometimes led in battle by grossly incompetent men. More-
over, religion often proved a handicap. Campaigns were delayed and
strategic moments were lost because the auguries were not right, and it
was believed that the gods did not favor an advance at the moment.
When the auguries were favorable, however, the troops had an added
confidence in victory, since they felt that the gods were on their side. The
Roman armies proved all but invincible. Only Hannibal was able to
outgeneral the Romans for any long period of time.

The Roman world-conquest and pacification of many peoples by sheer
force of arms had far-reaching consequences for the Roman age and for
the subsequent history of mankind. It was the chief source of that tradi-
tion of the prestige and glory of warfare which has cursed society since
Roman days. Oriental monarchs had their great military triumphs, but
Rome symbolized, far better than any other ancient state, the glorious
achievements of armies and generals and the subjection of civilizations
to the rule of an alien conqueror. David S. Muzzey has brilliantly sum-
marized the effects of the Roman military tradition upon subsequent gen-
erations :

The Roman spirit was bequeathed to Europe. Beneath all the art and letters,
all the industry and commerce, all the advance in humanity throughout European
history, that Roman ideal remains. When the old nations speak of patriotism
they mean the memory of their glorious wars. War has been their constant occu-
pation and pre-occupation. Not a generation that has passed since Virgil . . .
but has paid its terrible toll on the field of carnage to the ideal of pacifying the
world by arms.

It is not alone Germany, with the celebration of its men of blood and iron from
Otto the Great to Otto von Bismarck. The French, too, rejoice in the Napoleonic
legend. They have their glorious wars of the Grand Monarque. They bow
before the white plume of Henry of Navarre, and thrill to the echo of Roland's
horn at Roncevalles. The English have their proud memories of Agincourt and
Blenheim and Crecy and Waterloo, and celebrate their Napiers and Nelsons, and
"Little Bobs."

All these nations of old Europe have their glorious traditions of war, and each
one can find enough victories in the uninterrupted course of slaughter through the
Christian ages to justify its belief in its own invincible prowess — nay, even in its
divine mission to rule the rest. The Roman ideal still lives in them all. Great
Caesar's ghost still walks as at Philippi. He stalks, gaunt and terrifying, before

314 WAR AND PEACE

the chancelleries at London, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, at Vienna, Paris and
Rome.1

One of the most important contributions to military science in the
Middle Ages came from the Greek or Byzantine Empire, centered in
Constantinople. The Byzantines greatly improved upon the methods of
fortifying castles and cities. From their contact with the Byzantine
realms, the feudal lords gained the knowledge which led to the remarkable
advances in the fortifications of feudal castles in the later Middle Ages.
It is believed by many authorities that feudal warfare represented a
regression from the level of Roman military achievements, and that the
Roman legions could readily have defeated any army' of comparable size
in the age of chivalry. Without entering this controversial question, we
shall describe briefly the character of feudal warfare.

Down to the thirteenth century, the core of the feudal armies was the
assemblage of mounted knights, aided by crude infantry, which might be
armed with knives, spears, or even clubs and flails. Mounted knights
were protected by armor, which from about 1000 to 1200 was mainly the
so-called coat of mail or hauberk, made of interlaced iron rings or chain-
work. It was introduced, in part, by the Northmen and, in part, by con-
tact with the Eastern Empire, where it was in use at an earlier period than
in western Europe.

The coat of mail weighed heavily on the shoulders and arms and made
it difficult to use weapons with full force, especially the sword or ax, which
required a good deal of arm motion. Moreover, a blow from a weapon
drove the rings into the flesh of the wearer even though they did not cut
through. Cumbersome pads were used to overcome this defect, but these
further impeded the use of the arms. The superior metal working of the
Muslims produced a lighter and more effective coat of mail. The helmet
used in this period was usually a conical metal cap with iron rings pro-
tecting the face and neck. The disadvantages of the coat of mail led to
the general introduction, after 1200, of elaborate plate and jointed armor
and intricate helmets with effective visors.

The horse also was protected by armor, which changed as did that worn
by the rider. Archers wore less armor but still were fairly well protected.
The rabble of peasantry, which occasionally fought in the wars, were able
to provide little or no protection of their persons — only crude quilted
garments.

The weapons of the mounted knight were the long lance, a heavy sword,
the ax, and the mace. Foot soldiers other than archers were armed with
heavy swords for cutting, short spears, the ax, and the mace. The
mounted force was far more important than the foot soldiers until the
fourteenth century. By that time, the Swiss pike and halberd had been
introduced. The halberd was a combination of lance, ax, and hook on a
long handle. After these had been introduced, the foot soldiers fought

i D. S. Muzzey, The Menace of Patriotism, Ethical Culture Society, 1915, pp. 4-5.

WAR AND PEACE 315

as massed infantry, flanked by archers, and the late medieval infantry
became far more important than it had been. A rudimentary tank ap-
peared in the Bohemian armored wagon of the early fifteenth century, but
it was never widely used.

The archers became more and more important as the Middle Ages wore
along, especially in the English armies. The brilliant victories of the
English armies over the larger French forces in the later Middle Ages were
due chiefly to the superiority of the English bowmen. The ordinary bow
was in use fairly early, but the crossbow first became popular in the
twelfth century, when it was introduced by the Genoese archers. The
Church opposed it, but its first extended use was against the infidel in the
Crusades. While it became very popular outside of England, the cross-
bow had many disadvantages. It had to be set or "cocked" before each
discharge of the missile, thus losing a good bit of time in which a longbow-
man could be discharging several arrows. Further, it had to be carried
all strung up, which made it useless in wet weather. The longbowman
could unstring his bow and keep the bowstring dry until he wished to use
it. Later the crossbow was strung with a chain instead of gut. English
archery excelled, in part, because it relied chiefly upon the longbow in the
later Middle Ages.

At the height of the medieval period, the mounted force was the back-
bone of the feudal armies, aided by the foot soldiers and archers. The
feudal horsemen, about whom so much romance has collected, were actu-
ally an extremely cumbersome and ineffective fighting force, except in
massed attacks on other armies similarly equipped. Assembled from all
over the realm, they had little training, discipline, or unity. They ad-
vanced on the enemy in mass formation, so close that, as the old saying
went, "an apple thrown into their midst would not have fallen to the
ground." This made it difficult to move rapidly or execute brilliant
maneuvers. Moreover, as archery became more highly developed, great
confusion was introduced into the massed knights as their horses were shot
down or were rendered frantic and uncontrollable by arrow wounds. The
undermining of the preeminence of the armored and mounted knight in
warfare, as a result of the increased importance of the foot soldiers, armed
with pikes and halberds, and of the archers, was not only a military
change of great importance. It was also one of the more decisive factors
in the destruction of feudalism. The kings could hire their own infantry
and were no longer so dependent upon the feudal nobility for their
military retinue.

Because of the universality of fortified castles and towns in the
medieval period, siege warfare was very important. There was little
improvement here over the siege equipment of the Roman armies — or of
the Assyrians, for that matter. In some respects, the medieval siege
engineering was inferior to that of the Romans. The usual crude wooden
tower, testudines, scaling ladders, mangonels, battering-rams, and cata-
pults, were the main offensive weapons before the age of gunpowder.
Archers would also discharge showers of arrows over the walls of be-

316 WAR AND PEACE

leaguered cities. The lack of sanitation in the camps of the besieging
armies made the medievals far inferior to the Romans. Epidemics fre-
quently broke out and either greatly weakened the attacking army or
actually compelled the raising of the siege.

The use of gunpowder came more slowly than is usually imagined. We
hear of cannon being used at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, but any
cannon used in the fifteenth century were quasi-harmless curiosities. Not
until the sixteenth century were there any cannon effective against feudal
fortifications. The matchlock was the first effective small arm using
gunpowder. Next came the flintlock. On this was placed the bayonet,
thus combining the old pike with the newer musket. But the medieval
weapons were slowly abandoned. Bows and arrows were used by some
of the infantry in the battle of Leipzig in 1813. In the wars in central
Europe in the middle of the last century not a few soldiers were armed
with pikes, spears, and axes.

The invention of gunpowder restored the infantry, for a time, to the
position of predominant importance it had among the Romans. This
development in warfare gave a special source of strength, all other things
being equal, to those states which had a large population and could pro-
vide an impressive army of infantry. In the French Revolutionary wars
and the wars of Napoleon, a new stress was laid upon artillery fire, though
the infantry remained the backbone of the army.

We usually associate the rise of conscription with the absolutistic gov-
ernments, but to do so is historically inaccurate. The old monarchies
relied upon small armies of hired soldiers. The French Republic first
introduced conscription on a national scale in 1793. It was imitated later
by the Prussian monarchy. Democracy introduced mass armies, restored
the ascendency of the infantry, and promoted mass murder in warfare.2

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the most important advance
in the art of warfare was the rifling of muskets and cannon, increasing
their range and making them more accurate than the crude firearms
of the Napoleonic period. Percussion caps replaced flints in the firing
mechanism. Revolvers became popular after 1850, particularly among
the cowboys of the West. Most of the rifles used in the Mexican War
and the Civil War were muzzle-loaders fired by percussion caps. Very
few breech-loaders were then in use. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866
was the first conflict in which they played an important part. The
Prussians were armed with the so-called "needle gun." Mortars, canister
and shrapnel came into use in this period. Repeating rifles were not
generally used until the Spanish-American War, when smokeless powder
was also introduced. Machine guns came in at the close of the century.

From the time of the Anglo-Dutch wars in the seventeenth century to
the first World War, the command of the seas and naval power played a
large, perhaps a predominant, role in deciding the outcome of inter-
national conflicts. This fact was rationalized in the vastly influential

2 See Hoffman Nickerson, Can We Limit War? Stokes, 1934, chap, vii; also his
later book, The Armed Horde, Putnam, 1940.

WAR AND PEACE 317

writings of an American naval officer, Captain Alfred T. Mahan,3 whose
works, incidentally, were most faithfully followed in Japan. The long-
range air-bomber nosed out the naval vessel in the second World War as
the key to ascendency in warfare. But, so deep was the hold of the
doctrines of Mahan and others, that England and other countries placed
a fatal trust in their naval superiority until it was too late to readjust
their pattern of warfare without sustaining frightful losses. Even bright
newspapermen were able to write, after more than two years of the second
World War, as though air power had not outmoded Mahan's doctrines,
sound as they have been, even as late as 1900.4

The first World War produced the most striking changes in warfare
since the invention of gunpowder. Because of the great technical ad-
vances that had made machine guns and artillery efficiently deadly, open
fighting was abandoned, except for brief attacks. Long and elaborate
scries of trenches were constructed. These formed linked zigzag lines,
and had subterranean rooms for the storage of war supplies and for the
resting-quarters of the soldiers. Some of these trench lines were durably
built — notably the famous Hindenburg Line.

Separating the opposing trenches was "No Man's Land," a mass of
barbed wire and artificial banks of earth and stone. The impasse reached
in trench warfare during the first World War should have proved to the
experts that the ascendancy of the infantry was at an end. But the
generals were too stupid or too much victimized by their stereotypes to
recognize this fact. Hence we had horrible mass murder, which reached
its height in the ill-fated German attack upon Verdun and in the mas-
sacre of the Russian soldiers by the armies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff
in 1914.

Artillery was developed with scientific acumen. The "barrage" — a
terrific wall of coordinated artillery fire — was used for the protection of
troops advancing behind it. Large numbers of machine guns, the most
effective single instrument of the war, were used by both sides. Huge
cannon placed behind the trenches destroyed the enemy's towns and
fortifications. Explosives, both grenades and mines, were added to the
shrapnel and shot. Poison gas, a deadly innovation, was first used by
the Germans, but shortly by the Allies as well. Camouflage — the art of
concealing vulnerable objects both at sea and on land — became a wide-
spread practice.

Gasoline engines played a significant role in this conflict as driving
power for tanks, automobiles, and airplanes. The tank, first used by
the British and probably the most remarkable of the many new instru-
ments of warfare improvised during the struggle, was a huge caterpillar
affair protected by an iron covering, crawling over the battlefield un-
stopped by ditches, barbed wire, or mounds, spewing forth bullets, and
bringing death and havoc in its path.

8 W. D. Puleston, Mahan, Yale University Press, 1939.

*E.g. Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942.

318 WAR AND PEACE

The air fighting caught the interest of all peoples. One-man airplanes
were used in the first year of the war as a means of discovering the posi-
tion of the enemy and as a guide for the artillery. Later, two-seaters
having an unprecedented swiftness were employed for bombing purposes,
and for the use of the photographers, spies, and scouts. Hydroplanes
developed by the British assailed German submarines, and by 1916 squads
and formations of airships were organized and the battles of the air
were regarded as extraordinary feats of courage and valor. The emer-
gence of air "aces," survivors of a succession of air duels, furnished much
of the heroics of a war that was otherwise characterized by a lack of
romantic color.

The sea operations during the World War were less decisive in the
form of battles than they were in their bearing upon the control of the
commerce of the world. Great Britain's naval superiority never proved
of more critical importance. German commerce was swept from the sea
and, very quickly also, the German warships outside of the North Sea
were captured or sunk, and their raids upon British commerce terminated.
A water-tight blockade was imposed on Germany, which did more than
British arms ultimately to bring that country to its knees. Admiral
von Spee destroyed a small British squadron off the coast of Chile on
November 1, 1914, but his fleet was soon wiped out by the British in a
battle off the Falkland Islands.

There was only one major naval conflict during the war, the Battle of
Jutland, on May 31, 1916. While the Germans were ultimately com-
pelled to retreat before overwhelming odds to their fortified cover, they
inflicted heavy losses upon the British. Not since the rise of the British
navy in the seventeenth century had the British come off so badly in a
major naval battle. It is possible that Admiral Jellicoe might have
repeated the feat of Nelson at Trafalgar had he been less timid or
cautious. So the Germans had one brilliant exploit to their credit on
the sea during the World War, but it proved only a futile show of superior
bravery and strategy. The German fleet never again risked its fate.

The two outstanding innovations in the second World War were the
aifplanes and the tanks. These had been introduced during the first
World War but were used so slightly as to be more dramatic than effec-
tive. In the second World War, they became the most important arm
of the offensive.

The appalling losses of the Polish and Dutch armies in a few days
of warfare showed that the best infantry, lacking mechanized equipment,
was hopelessly ineffective. "Mass armies merely meant mass ceme-
teries."

The outstanding strategic change in the second World War was the
so-called Blitzkrieg, or lightning war. In this, the airplanes led off, ter-
rorizing and bombing the enemy. They prepared the way for the
mechanized forces, equipped with tanks and motorized divisions. Be-
hind these came the infantry, to occupy the penetrated territory and
consolidate the gains. In two weeks, the German Blitzkrieg overcame

WAR AND PEACE 319

a Polish army which might have stood ground for many months against
the German army which conquered the Russians in 1914. We may now
briefly describe the organization and operation of these mechanized
troops, recognizing that they varied somewhat as the war went on and
opened up new contacts and enemies.

A German mechanized division is known as a Panzer division. • It is
made up, usually, of two regiments of break-through tanks and two
regiments of assault tanks, along with the supporting motorized infantry.
There are normally around four hundred tanks in such divisions. In the
first World War, the artillery laid down the barrage that preceded an
attack. In the second World War, the barrage was supplied by German
dive bombers. They blasted the enemy troops with machine gun fire,
dropped bombs on cities and fortifications, and laid down smoke screens
to hide the advancing break-through tanks. The latter were usually
twenty-ton tanks, carrying 8 to 16 men and armed with machine guns and
small cannon. Moving along with these tanks were giant amphibian
tanks, which were watertight and could go through any river.

Behind the break-through tanks came the assault tanks, which were
smaller tanks of 6 to 10 tons, also carrying machine guns and small
cannon. The assault tanks fanned out in the wake of the big break-
through tanks to attack and demoralize troops in trenches, machine-gun
nests, and pill boxes. They could also shoot flames out to a distance of
70 yards.

The third wave of mechanized assault was provided by the motorized
infantry carried in armored trucks, followed by motorized field artillery.
The motorized infantry and artillery widened the breach made by
the tanks and held it until the ordinary infantry could come up and
consolidate the gains. The big break-through tanks could make a
speed of 18 miles an hour and the assault tanks were much faster. For
clean-up work and special assaults, each Panzer division included a
number of high-speed Diesel tanks, which could go as fast as 85 miles
per hour on the road and 50 miles an hour across country. A few big
eighty-ton tanks were also included. These were literally moving for-
tresses, carrying field guns and howitzers, to be used against especially
stubborn obstructions.

While the French army was considered the best in Europe for partic-
ipation in ordinary infantry operations, it was almost helpless before
the German mechanized divisions. Fire from rifles, machine guns, and
light anti-tank guns rattled off the German tanks like so many peas.
And while the French 75's were effective against the tanks, there were
too few of them to accomplish much against the seemingly limitless re-
plenishment of the German mechanized units. In the Riom trials of
1942, former Premier Daladier contended that the French had more tanks
than the Germans on the western front in 1940, but the French generals
were too stupid and stubborn to make use of them. If this be true, it is
a sad indictment of the French military mind.

The German invasion of Russia proved, however, that the Blitzkrieg

320 WAR AND PEACE

methods and the Panzer divisions were not invincible. Over short dis-
tances, where the blow could be struck with lightning speed, and against
poorly mechanized forces, these new methods were indeed overpowering.
But in the Russian campaign the element of surprise could not be long
sustained over a great front; vast distances prevented any speedy
knockout; and the extensive mechanization of the Russian forces pro-
vided a worthy foe. The novel and appalling character of war between
fairly well matched mechanized forces is thus summarized by W. H.
Chamber lin, in describing a battle between thousands of Russian and
German tanks:

It was like some battle of the gods and giants in Norse mythology. Houses
were overturned like ninepins. Trees were uprooted, hills torn up in such a way
that the entire contour of the battlefield was completely changed. New heights
and new valleys appeared. And the crash of fifty-ton tanks ramming each other
head-on sounded like the crash of doom.5

In addition to their use in the Blitzkrieg, airplanes were extensively
employed in bombing cities and industrial centers. Most notable after
the summer of 1940 was the German bombardment of British cities.
Serious damage was done in single nights, as in the case of the bombard-
ment of Coventry in December, 1940. The British retaliated by bombing
German cities, but they were relatively unsuccessful, because their bases
were further removed from the area to be bombed, and their bombers
could not be adequately protected by fighter-planes. Airplanes also did
much damage to shipping, and were able to sink the largest warships
and airplane carriers. The torpedo plane proved especially deadly to
the heaviest warships, as was dramatically shown when the Japanese
sank the giant British battle cruisers Prince of Wales and Repulse in
December, 1941.

A most impressive use of artillery was the Russian bombardment of
the Mannerheim Line in the war against Finland in February, 1940.
Here the bombardment equaled in intensity and volume that of any of
the major engagements on the western front in the first World War.

.The submarines were most successful in aggressive naval action, while
light cruisers and destroyers were most efficient in protecting merchant-
men against submarines. British sea power still remained important in
enabling Britain to maintain her blockade of Germany. The fall of
France and German economic relations with Russia served, however, to
make the British blockade less effective than in the first World War. But
such things as the speedy collapse of the British and Dutch holdings in
Malaya and the East Indies in 1941-42 showed that the day of sea
power, as the key to world power, was at an end. Sea power has come
to mean little unless supplemented by air power. Perhaps the airplane
carrier will provide an effective union of sea and air power for a far-
flung offensive.

e New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1942, p. 3.

WAR AND PEACE 321

Mechanized and total warfare has become a far more brutal affair
than even the first World War. As Gregory Zilboorg points out, the
realities of the second World War are as bad as the fanciful "atrocities"
of the first World War:

We were almost "chivalrous" in those days [the first World War] ; guerrillas
and franc-tireurs were considered illegal, illegitimate. Today, the guerrillas are
a worthy part of our "totality." The sinking of the Limtania aroused the world ;
the torpedoing of the Zam-Zam raised but an infinitesimal diplomatic ripple, for
the sinking of tankers and passenger boats and the bombardment of peaceful cities
have become a part of our totality war effort. We need no Lord Bryce to
investigate and make a report on atrocities. We read about them every day, for
they are an integral part of the atrocity propaganda made by modern warfare
and life itself.6

Leading Aspects of the Evolution of War as a Social Institution. As
civilization has developed, was has played an ever more important role.
However it may have started originally, it has become a vested social
interest. The use of modern technology and economic organization has
made warfare, more destructive of life and property than ever before.
The German-Russian campaign of 1941 proved that mechanized warfare
takes a tremendous toll of human life.

Another important fact about war is that, in general, the large countries
are much more given to fighting than the smaller countries :

Countries differ greatly in the frequency with which they have been at war.
Since the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, there have been about 2,300
battles among European states. In these 2,300 battles, France participated in
49 per cent; Austria-Hungary in 35 per cent, Prussia in 26 per cent; Great
Britain and Russia each in 23 per cent; Turkey in 15 per cent; Spain and The
Netherlands each in 11 per cent, Sweden in 4 per cent and Denmark in 1 per cent.
These percentages are for the whole period of three centuries. If we tabulate
by 50 year periods, it appears that the percentage of participation by France,
Austria, Great Britain and Turkey has been constant, that by Prussia and Russia
has tended to increase, and that by Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden and Den-
mark has decreased to almost nothing in the last century. Clearly the great
powers are great fighters.7

Out of 950 years of French history, the French were at war in over
80 per cent of these years, and only one quarter-century was free of an
important war. Out of 875 years in English history, 72 per cent were
war years and only one quarter-century was free from war. Of 275 years
of German history, 29 per cent were war years, but no quarter-century
was free from war.8

Warfare seems to concentrate in periods about fifty years apart,
though in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a hundred-year period

6 Saturday Review of Literature, March 7, 1942, p. 7.

7Quincy Wright, The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace, Longmans,
Green, 1935, p. 29. Much of the material in this section is drawn from Professor
Wright's important book.

8 P. A. Sorikin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 3 vols., American Book Company,
1937, Vol. Ill, Part IL

322 WAR AND PEACE

for major wars seemed noticeable, at least, before the second World War
broke out. If warfare predominates at fifty-year intervals, the usual
duration of a war has been four or five years. In modern times, the
increasing intensity of warfare has made it ever more difficult to prolong
a war beyond five years. The fifty-year period for the concentration
of warfare is explained by the fact that it takes about that long to get
over a major war and get ready for another. Further, it requires about
this length of time for people to forget the horrors of war and accept
another. The fact that our generation was toughened by the first World
War and that new machines hasten war preparations may account for
the world's being willing to take on a second world war in less than 25
years after the end of the first one.

A typical technique of warfare used to last for about 250 years. In
the centuries before Charlemagne, wars in western Europe were fought
mainly by armed champions supported by the rabble. From the era
of Charlemagne to that of William the Conqueror, wars were fought by
royal knights and footsoldiers, who were able to maneuver rather freely.
From the days of William the Conqueror to the Battle of Crecy, in 1346,
wars were fought mainly by heavily armored feudal knights, who charged
on horses in mass formation. From the Battle of Crecy to the introduc-
tion of firearms, about 1600, wars were fought chiefly by the infantry,
armed with missile weapons, particularly the longbow and the cross-
bow. From 1600 through the Napoleonic wars, highly mobile forces,
organized as national armies, dominated the scene. The infantry was
most important, but the artillery came to be of great significance. From
the American Civil war through the first World War the infantry pre-
dominated, the army making use of ever improved firearms, such as
breech-loading rifles, machine guns, rapid fire artillery and long range
cannons. The rapid development of modern technology has now short-
ened the period of dominant war-techniques. In the second World War
airplanes and mechanized forces had come into their own. The Polish
army, well equipped in 1939 to fight the war of 1914, was obsolete and
helpless before the German mechanized forces. A change in technique,
requiring 250 years in earlier days, had been brought about in twenty-five.

Leaving aside ancient Rome, there has been a great increase in the
size of standing armies. In the seventeenth century, the larger armies
had only fifty or sixty thousand men. In the Napoleonic period, France
had armies as large as 500,000 men. Before the second World War broke
out, the major countries each had over a million men in their standing
armies, and Russia had an army of several millions.9 In the 1930's the
standing armies of the major European states were twice as large, in
proportion to population, as the Roman army under Augustus.

Another historical trend in warfare has been the decline in the duration
of wars and in the proportion of war years to peace years. In the
seventeenth century the major European states were at war about 75

9 England, relying on her sea power, was an exception.

WAR AND PEACE 323

per cent of the time, in the eighteenth century about 50 per cent of the
time, and in the nineteenth century about 25 per cent of the time. The
twentieth century may reverse this trend and increase the percentage of
time the nations were at war.

One can also note a new trend in the increased duration of battles
and an increase in the number of battles in a war year. In the seven-
teenth century, there were about four battles in a war year, in the
eighteenth about 15, in the nineteenth about 28, and in the twentieth
over 50.

Before the first World War, campaigns usually lasted one season, and
since the Middle Ages over 80 per cent of all campaigns have taken place
in summer months. The normal battle period was one day. Trench
warfare in the first World War, however, introduced almost constant
battles periodically increasing to a pitch of major fury.

Another noticeable trend has been the increasing economic cost of war,
even in proportion to the population. In Caesar's time it cost 75 cents
to kill a soldier; in Napoleon's time, about $3,000; in the first World War,
$21,000; and in the second World War, about $50,000.10 The number of
killed has, however, mounted with the use of more expensive and deadly
war equipment.

There had been a tendency for the ravages on the civilian population
to decline, but the second World War reversed the process. Air bombard-
ment wrought vast damage on civilians and the Blitzkrieg produced
millions of refugees.

An important change in war is the decreased role of battles in determin-
ing the outcome of wars. Economic resources and organization, and
propaganda activities, have become relatively more important in win-
ning wars than activities on the battle field, though the latter are still of
primary significance. In final analysis, wars still have to be won by
fighting rather than talking, though good propaganda may reduce the
amount of fighting needed for victory.

Finally, at least until the rise of totalitarianism, wars seemed to be
getting less important as an instrument in controlling world politics.
With the increasing cost of war in human life and economic equipment,
the nations became more reluctant to start wars and more given to reli-
ance upon diplomacy and bluffing in promoting their policies and
ambitions.

The Development of the Military System. The origins of militarism
go back to ancient history. The Assyrians used to conscript an army,
mainly from farmers and herdsmen, for the war season. Sparta first
developed a thorough-going military system, in which all the adult male
Spartans were compelled to be perpetually liable for military service.
Sparta was veritably an armed camp. In the early Republic, the Romans
conscripted their farmers. By the late Republic and during the imperial

10 J. H. S. Bossard, "War and the Family," American Sociological Review, June.
1941, p. 339.

324 WAR AND PEACE

period, Rome had a large standing army of about three soldiers to each
thousand of the population. From the decline of the Roman Empire to
the rise of feudalism, there was no real military system. This faded out
along with other ancient institutions.

In the period of feudalism there was a permanent warrior class but
no national standing army. The feudal lords and knights were sum-
moned to war and then returned to their castles when it was over. At
first the townsmen of the Middle Ages fought their own wars, but they
soon hired mercenaries to fight their battles.

The first standing army arose at the close of the Hundred Years War,
when King Charles VII of France hired a small standing army to help
demobilize the host of warriors at the end of the war. From the fifteenth
century to the French Revolution, the royal standing army dominated
the military scene. But the king did not usually assemble or control his
army directly. He contracted with private individuals, chiefly the lesser
nobility, to collect, train, and feed the army. Very frequently, the latter
was made up, in considerable part, of foreigners, mercenaries and vaga-
bonds. The officers were drawn mainly from the nobility, and this preva-
lence of a caste system among the officers lessened the efficiency of the
army. Later on, especially in Prussia, military schools were provided
for officers and a more direct and rigorous state control was established
over the army.

The next important development in the military system was the rise
of a popular army and the introduction of conscription. The example of
the American Revolutionary army, an army of embattled farmers and
militia, entirely devoid of military caste, had a considerable effect upon
European military thought and practice. The marked success of the
armies of Frederick the Great also led to serious criticism of mercenary
armies led by incompetent noblemen.

As early as 1770, the Count de Guibert, in his General Essay on Tactics,
emphasized the virtues of a popular army, raised from the citizens, and
imbued with a spirit of patriotism. In February, 1790, a law was passed
by the French revolutionists directing the technical training of officers and
their promotion according to a system of merit. In February and
August, 1793, conscription was ordered, to provide a strong national army
and repel the invasion of France by the reactionary powers. The old
noble officers were thrown out and revolutionary generals were installed.
The result was the first national army on a mass scale:

Given mass armies inspired to frenzy by the passions and ideas of the Revolu-
tion, warfare took on novel aspects. Within and around the regular troops of
the old style were large numbers of men, more individualized and more ruthless
in combat than any soldiers of a standing army, drilled and commanded by noble
officers accustomed to the conceptions and customs of feudal honor. Recruiting
under the February Law brought 180,000; the levee en masse some 250,000 men.
By January 1, 1794, some 770,000 men belonged to the diverse armies and
500,000 of them stood along the exterior front.11

11 Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, Norton, 1937, p. 116.

WAR AND PEACE 325

Napoleon improved and extended this system of national armies. He
developed the notion of the "total war," as the business of the whole
people. Mr. Hoffman Nickerson, in his essay on "Democracy and Mass
Massacre" 12 and his more recent book, The Armed Horde,™ has shown the
great significance of this change. The losses of life in the French Revo-
lutionary and the Napoleonic wars vastly exceeded those of any earlier
war. Only 5,000 men had been killed in 1704, the year of the Battle of
Blenheim. With so many men at his disposal, Napoleon was prodigal
of men in battle. He lost about 40,000 men in the Battle of Borodino
in 1812. This waste of manpower was one reason for his ultimate defeat.
Finally, disease in these mass armies, without scientific provision for
sanitation and medical treatment, killed even more than gunfire. There
is no doubt that conscription and the national army enormously increased
the deadliness and ferocity of war. Another effect of conscription was
to make armies revolutionary and devoted to extending the new system
of society by force of arms. This fact was not realized by American
conservatives, when they so enthusiastically recommended peacetime
conscription for the United States in 1940.

Conscription and universal military service, even in peace time, are
frequently confused. We may conscript a large number of persons for
a given war, but have no system of universal military service, in which
all the able-bodied male population have to submit to military training
for one or more years, in peace time as well as war. Soldiers conscripted
for a war may be allowed to return home as soon as the war is over. It
was Prussia which introduced universal military service in modern times.
After Napoleon had conquered the Prussians at Jena, in 1806, he ordered
the Prussian army reduced to 42,000 men. But the Prussians got around
his restrictions by subterfuge. They trained 42,000 men, then returned
them to private life and trained another 42,000, thus building up a large
well-trained army. Scharnhorst, Boyen, and other Prussian military
reformers recommended drawing all able-bodied Prussians into army
service. Preliminary laws were passed in 1812-1813 and finally, in
September, 1814, universal military service was established. It was
extended to the German Empire after 1870.

After the Franco-Prussian War, the Third French Republic succumbed
to the system of universal military service and created a national mass
army with the law of 1872. Since France had a smaller population than
Germany, but wished to have just as strong an army, she had to have a
larger proportion of her population under arms. The majority of other
Continental states had either established a system of universal military
service before the Franco-Prussian War or followed in the wake of
France after 1872. Great Britain held out against conscription until the
first World War. During this conflict all the major powers involved,
including the United States, resorted to conscription.

12 Originally published in The American Mercury, and reprinted as chap, vii of
his Can We Limit War?

13 Putnam, 1940.

326 WAR AND PEACE

In the 1930's the Nazis, in Germany, set up a military system more
thoroughgoing and efficient than anything ever envisaged by Scharnhorst,
Bismarck, Moltke, or the Kaiser. They not only provided for universal
service but essentially conscripted the whole civilian population in "total
war" preparations:

Both Fascism and Communism, depending more than democracies for their
daily existence on their armies, attempt a greater penetration of their peoples
by military ideas ; the masses are organized in a quasi-military way in uniformed
formations under leaders whom the rank and file recognize as permanent, not
merely temporary, superiors. Military metaphors abound in directions and
exhortations, such as "victories on the harvest front," the "butter battle/' the
"March on Rome." But there is some difference in aim between them: the
Bolshevist state indeed offers the theoretical promise that the military bondage
of the present is only a transition period on the way to a millennium in which
all force will be ended; it does not exalt military exertion and expenditure as
good in themselves. By contrast, the militarism of the Third Reich is expected
even theoretically to endure one or two thousand years, for it is the essence of
that Empire; there, as Sieburg says, "the population sees in the carrier of arms
a symbol of itself." 14

Another interesting aspect of totalitarian militarism is that, like the
military situation in the French Revolution, the conscript mass armies
have once again become revolutionary armies, spreading revolution by
military force. They will spread revolution, even though they may be
defeated, just as Napoleon's armies promoted the rise of nationalism and
other revolutionary changes in the countries which he overran.

The Underlying Causes of War in
Contemporary Society

Biological Causes of War. There can be no hope of ending war unless
we thoroughly understand the complex forces which lead mankind to
continue this savage and archaic method of handling the relations among
states. War can be disposed of only through an understanding of, and a
consistent attack upon, those material conditions and those attitudes
of mind which make them possible in contemporary society. Any limited
conception of the causes of war or any tendency to overemphasize one
set of causes must be guarded against:

The motives which have led to aggression by human populations are too
numerous to mention. Leaders have sought wealth, revenge, prestige, dynastic
expansion, the deflation of internal revolt, adventure and the propaganda of
religions; and the masses have supported them with the expectation of adven-
ture, plunder, sadistic orgies, relief from boredom, better lands, higher wages,
loyalty to the leader, religious enthusiasm, feminine approval.15

The biological causes of war include those that represent biological
realities and those which rest upon a mistaken application of biological

14 Vagts, op. cit., p. 442.

15 Wright, The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace, p. 108.

WAR AND PEACE 327

and pseudo-biological principles to social processes. The most important
potential biological cause of war is that tendency of the human species
to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence, a fact perceived
by Malthus more than a century ago. This tendency makes it necessary
for the surplus population to look elsewhere for new homes. There was,
however, down to the first World War, a large amount of relatively un-
occupied space, to which the surplus populations of the more congested
districts of the world might freely migrate. Hence there was no direct
biological cause of war inherent in population increases down to 1914.

Yet population pressure was a contributing cause in producing the
world catastrophe of 1914, because that popular biological doctrine had
become inseparably linked with a dangerous political dogma. It was
commonly believed to be disastrous both to the mother country and to
the emigrants for any large number of people to take up residence under
the political authority of another country. It was held that migrating
citizens should retain their citizenship and carry the glories of their native
land overseas.

Such an aspiration was possible only in conjunction with the develop-
ment of colonies. While much of the earth's surface was still available
for occupation by individuals, relatively little remained open for the
colonial dominion of any state at the close of the nineteenth century.
England, Russia, France and Holland had appropriated the larger portion
of the earth's surface not already under the dominion of independent
sovereign states.

The desire to obtain colonies for population outlet, particularly on the
part of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the hard fact that potential
colonial areas were constantly diminishing, precipitated many of the
international crises which constituted the diplomatic background of the
wars between 1900 and 1920. Had not the patriotic and colonial
psychosis existed, however, the population increases would not have been
an important factor in producing international problems and promoting
war.

Though population increase may not, in the past, have constituted a
vital cause of conflict, it may be an important cause of war in the future.
There are actually some areas which are now becoming overpopulated,
when taken in conjunction with their limited resources or technological
lag. Writers like W. S. Thompson have referred to these areas as
"danger spots in world population." It has been held that the recent
tendency for the rate of population growth to slow down in western
countries removes this cause of war and war sentiment. This is not true,
so long as the population is growing rapidly elsewhere and pressing on
the means of subsistence, and so long as western states have colonial,
imperialistic, and diplomatic interests in eastern regions which are directly
affected by rapid population growth. Only a universal slowing down
would remove this biological impulse to war.

Another important biological fact in the war pattern is that man has
developed to his present state of ascendancy in part by operating as a

328 WAR AND PEACE

fighting animal. War and physical struggles have unquestionably played
an important role in the biological history of man, and have left their
impress upon him in his instinctive tendencies, physiological processes,
and traditional values:

Men *like war. They often fight for the love of excitement or the mere lust
of fighting. While it is true, as someone has said, that anyone will fight when
he is mad enough, it is also a fact that men will fight when they are not aroused,
but just for the fun of it. War offers diversion and relief from ennui. It pro-
vides a mode of escape from the monotony of a dull existence. Primitive life
seems to afford scanty amusements and means of recreation; the savage is so
engrossed in a severe struggle for existence that his life leaves little room for
diversion. Hence men like to fight. The most exciting things they know are
hunting, herding, and warfare. These are the occupations they enjoy, and their
pursuit affords a considerable measure of satisfaction and pleasure.

War also furnishes a ready means of bringing distinction to one's self, for the
military virtues have ever been honored and extolled. The women, as we have
seen, prefer men who have given proof of their prowess, they receive the returning
warrior with songs of praise, they feast him and crowd around to listen to his
exploits. All this appeals to man's vanity and gives him additional motives for
fighting.16

It would be nonsense to contend, as some have done, that man is pre-
eminently a fighting animal, but it is equally absurd to maintain that he
is wholly pacific and characterized chiefly by a sweet-tempered spirit of
brotherly love. The sane procedure for the friends of peace is to provide
an educational system which will promote the pacific and cooperative
tendencies of man and sublimate or divert his warlike proclivities. Any
scheme for peace which ignores the inherent human capacity for blind
rage toward citizens of other states is likely to be wrecked. This fact
was well driven home by the example of the international Socialists of
the various European countries who, before the first World War, had
sworn to an eternal brotherhood based on the international solidarity
of the working classes, but who rallied to the standards of their several
fatherlands in the summer of 1914 with a gusto which, in many cases,
exceeded that evidenced by the monarchists and capitalists. It was also
demonstrated amply by the American liberals and radicals, who had been
the backbone of the peace movement from 1920 to 1939. They took the
lead in stirring up war sentiment in the United States from 1939 to 1942.

Among the erroneous dogmas about war is the doctrine that war, in
human society, is the social analogue of the biological struggle for exist-
ence in the realm of organic evolution. This is the doctrine which is
sometimes known as "social Darwinism." It is incorrect to hold Darwin
responsible for any such dogma, as he frankly admitted that he did not
know how far the processes of biological evolution could be applied in
explaining the problems of social development. But a number of biolo-
gists and sociologists have warmly espoused the view that the chief factor
in social and cultural progress has been the wars between human groups,
from the days of tribal society to the world wars of the present age.

16 M. R. Davie, The Evolution of War, Yale University Press, 1929, p. 147.

WAR AND PEACE 329

The fallacies underlying this view have been relentlessly exposed by
such writers as Jacques Novicow, G. M. Nicolai, and D. S. Jordan. In
the first place, the theory is not valid in a strictly biological sense, since
the active struggle for existence in the biological world is rarely a battle
within the same species. The selective process that goes on within any
single species is normally one which leads the weaker members of the
species to succumb more quickly than their more vigorous associates in
the joint struggle for food and protection. In fact, the human animal
is almost the only animal that preys upon his own species. This he has
come to do, not because of any inherent biological necessity, but primarily
because of perverted mental attitudes and cultural traditions, which have
made him look upon war as the only honorable method of solving some
of his problems.

War has provided a sort of institutional cannibalism, which, in higher
cultures, has been substituted for the bald physical cannibalism of
savages. But the slaughter in modern warfare is far more revolting and
indefensible than primitive cannibalism. Savages killed sparingly and
made good use of those whom they killed. Modern warfare is far more
purposeless, imbecilic, and wasteful than primitive cannibalism. Indeed,
cannibals have contempt for our "civilized" wars. An old cannibal chief
in New Guinea once observed to the eminent anthropologist, Bronislaw
Malinowski: "You tell me that thousands of people are killed in one day
and left rotting and uneaten on the fields. We never did such a dastardly
thing to our enemies. We ate them honorably, and thus satisfied our
hunger, and then paid our respects to their souls."

Even if the theory of nature "red in tooth and claw" were valid in a
biological sense, it would not by any means follow that this doctrine is
sociologically sound. Biological processes are not usually directly trans-
ferable to the social realm, but must be modified in the light of the
widely different factors and situations which distinguish society from
the biological organism.

Hence, while war in primitive society may have been an integrating
and disciplinary factor making possible the origins of orderly political
society, war at the present time is both an institutional anachronism and
an unmitigated menace to culture and social welfare. In our day, an
efficient technology and the mechanization of warfare have made war a
test of technical genius and capacity for organization rather than of
biological superiority. As Nicolai and Jordan have shown, war is today
biologically counter-selective, the better physical types being drained off
and decimated as "cannon-fodder," while the task of future procreation is
passed on to the inferior types which remain safely preserved at home.
Added to this are the biological ravages of disease, suffering, starvation,
and mutilation which war inevitably brings in its train.

Among the socio-biological causes of war are the various race dogmas
which have prevailed in the last half-century or so. For a long time, we
labored under the menace of the "white man's burden" doctrine, namely,
that the white races are superior and must bring the blessings of higher

330 WAR AND PEACE

civilization to the inferior races, by force if necessary. This dogma
lent support to imperialism and imperialistic wars and to the slaughter
of natives not capable of grasping and voluntarily accepting the higher
logic of the white man's burden. More recently, especially in Nazi
Germany, the notion of the superiority of the so-called "Aryan" branch
of the white race has been growing in popularity. This has been made
a foundation of Nazi anti-Semitism and of plans for conquering and
ruling "non-Aryan" peoples. But the father of this doctrine was Joseph
Arthur de Gobineau, a Frenchman; Hitler derived his social notions
mainly from Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Scotchman; Madison
Grant popularized such dogmas in the United States nearly twenty years
before Hitler came to power in Germany; and Grant's aberrations re-
ceived the pontifical blessings of the eminent American naturalist, Henry
Fairfield Osborn.

The exponents of world peace must recognize both the realities and the
fallacies in these biological factors involved in war. A fallacious dogma
may be quite as potent in causing war as a biological reality. Education
must be designed to eliminate, so far as possible, both the actually biolog-
ical and the pseudo-biological causes of conflict.

Psychological Causes of War. The second main type of funda-
mental causes of war, as we shall classify them here, is the psychological.
One psycho-cultural cause of war closely related to social Darwinism is
the "cult of war," which represents military and naval achievement as
the most noble activity to which a people may devote itself, and elevates
the military classes to a position of social ascendancy. It is held that
war brings forth the noblest and most unselfish of human sentiments, as
well as the most heroic manifestations of devotion to the group. Those
who have done the most to bring glorious victories in time of war are
looked upon as the great heroes in the country's past.

Inseparably related to this war cult is pride in territorial aggression.
It emerges in what has been called the "mapitis psychosis." Maps of the
national states and of the world are so drawn as to indicate in impressive
coloration territory wrested from neighboring or enemy states.

• The main propaganda technique exploited by exponents of the war cult
in securing popular support is the alarmist "bogey," and the allegation,
whether well-founded or not, that we must "prepare" against supposed
threats of aggression. This was a basic apology for the great armaments
of the decade before the first World War, which were alleged to be merely
preparations for peace. But Professor W. G. Sumner correctly prophe-
sied that they would inevitably lead to war. Yet the illusion was used
just as effectively in the propaganda that led to the second World War.

Since readers are familiar enough with the first World War, it will not
be necessary to refute the fundamental contentions of the exponents of
the war cult. War, instead of promoting the noblest of our emotions,
evokes, for the most part, the most base and brutal traits in human
behavior. Lust, cruelty, pillage, corruption, profiteering, and intolerance
are among the attitudes invariably generated by military activity. As

WAR AND PEACE 331

Elmer Davis has done well to point out, the first World War struck a blow
at western civilization from which we may never recover:

Spiritually and morally, civilization collapsed on August 1, 1914 — the civiliza-
tion in which people now middle-aged grew up, a culture which with all its short-
comings did give more satisfaction to more people than any other yet evolved.
Young people cannot realize how the world has been coarsened and barbarized
since 1914; they may feel the loss of the security into which their parents were
born but they cannot appreciate how much else has been lost; even we who once
had it cannot recall it now without an effort. But the collapse of a great cul-
ture is a long process; it took the Roman world four or five centuries to hit
bottom. Since 1914 we have slipped back as far perhaps as the Romans slipped
between the Antonine age and the days of Alexander Severus.17

Yet, fallacious as the theory of the war cult may be, it is still power-
ful and constitutes one of the chief obstacles to any sane discussion of
war or much practical achievement in the cause of peace. There is no
intention in this book to criticize or disparage existing military and
naval establishments which are essential to national protection while the
war system continues. We are merely attacking the philosophy which
defends and perpetuates the war system and renders armies and navies
necessary. At the same time, military and naval authorities have no
legitimate right to interefere unduly in the affairs of the civil govern-
ment or to dominate educational policy.

Akin to the cult of war is the sentiment which is usually christened
"patriotism." In discussing this matter we must distinguish between
two altogether different concepts. One is that noble ideal of devotion to
the social community, which was first extensively developed by the an-
cient Greek philosophers and expounded more thoroughly by the modern
German and English Idealists. This is, perhaps, the highest of human
socio-psychological achievements and is one of the things which most
distinctly separates us from the animal kingdom.

On the other hand, we have that quasi-savage sentiment of group
aggression and selfishness, known as "Hundred-Percentism." This is a
projection into modern civilization of the psychology of the animal
hunting-pack and the savagery of primitive tribesmen. It is certainly
one of the lowest, most brutal, and most dangerous of psychic attitudes
and behavior patterns. The scientific and industrial revolutions have
given it a technological basis for nation-wide expression and made it a
world menace.

Down to the outset of the nineteenth century there could be little
national patriotism, because the majority of mankind knew little beyond
the neighborhood or local group. Suddenly, the telephone, the telegraph,
the cable, the railroad, the printing press, the cheap daily newspaper, free
city and rural delivery of mail, the movies, and the radio spread neighbor-
hood superstitution, narrow-mindedness, provincialism, and savagery

17 Elmer Davis, "We Lose the Next War," Harper's Magazine, March, 1938, p. 342.

332 WAR AND PEACE

throughout the entire limits of a great national state.18 Thus we may
all simultaneously pick up our morning papers at the breakfast table and
have our group pride inflated by the record of the doings of the American
marines in Australia or Eritrea, or have our passions aroused by an
alleged insult to our national honor in Persia or Timbuktu. The citizens
of an entire state may now be stirred as rapidly and completely by the
press, radio, and newsreels as a neighborhood was a century ago by a visit
of a messenger from the battle-front. The potentialities of the movies
and the radio in the service of patriotic fanaticism almost transcend imagi-
nation. Until we are able to deflate and suppress a narrow patriotism
and to substitute for it the constructive sentiment of civic pride and
international good-will, there can be little hope of developing those
cooperative attitudes and agencies upon which the program of world
peace depends.

A powerful stimulant to savage patriotism has been national history
and literature. In the first place, our histories have been filled primarily
with records of battles and the doings of military and naval heroes. A
country's importance and prestige have been held to depend primarily
upon its warlike achievements. The activities of scientists, inventors,
or artists, who have been the real architects of civilization, receive scant
notice. Hence it is not surprising that, as children, we develop the
opinion that war is the most significant and important of all human
activities.

Even worse, the record of wars and diplomatic intrigues, has been
notoriously distorted in school textbooks. The country of the writer is
usually represented as having been invariably right in all instances of
international dispute, and all wars are represented as gloriously fought
defensive conflicts. In this way, fear, hatred, and intolerance of neigh-
boring states are generated in the minds of school children, to be continued
later through the biased and prejudiced presentation of international
news in the press and on the air and screen. Little training is afforded in
the development of a judicious and reflective consideration of interna-
tional issues, though a few textbook writers have, of late, attempted to
improve both the subject-matter and the tone of our school textbooks.
Their salutary efforts have, however, been savagely attacked by innum-
erable patriotic and hyphenated societies which endeavor to stir up
international hatreds and prejudices. Such attention as is given to the
questions of national culture in many textbooks is usually devoted to a
demonstration of the superiority of the culture of the author's country
to that of any adjoining political group.

In recent years, writers have called our attention to the dangers in the
super-patriotic teachings in the history textbooks in the United States.
But, as J. F. Scott has amply demonstrated, the school textbooks in most
European states have been far more chauvinistic and bigoted than the
worst of the school texts in this country even a generation ago. When

i*See above, pp. 219-221.

WAR AND PEACE 333

the minds of children are thus poisoned with suspicion, fear, arrogance,
bigotry, and intolerance, there is little hope that they will develop a sense
of calmness and justice in their scrutiny of international affairs. The
foregoing psychological causes of war are regarded by the author as of
transcendent importance, because all other factors — biological, social,
economic, or political — become active only through their psychological
expression.

In practice, nearly all the psychological causes of war emerge in direct
relation to, or as some mode of manifestation of, nationalism.10 There-
fore, nationalism is, unquestionably, one of the most dangerous menaces
to world peace, and the attacks upon nationalism by Carlton J. H. Hayes
and others is a most promising way to undermine the war system. We
do not ignore or minimize the economic factors underlying international
rivalry and war, but we do contend that contemporary economic processes
produce or threaten war, in part, because they are interwoven with the
"nationalism" complex.

Finally, one of the most dangerous and stubborn psychological causes
of war is the semi-fatalistic assumption that war is "inevitable," and that
it must be resorted to frequently, as a means of solving both domestic
and international problems. This attitude is well-expressed in Colonel
Robert Stockton's big book, Inevitable War,20 and more learnedly and
moderately in Hoffman Nickerson's Can We Limit War? 21 So long as
mankind goes on assuming that war is inevitable, it surely will be such.

Sociological Causes of War. Of the alleged sociological causes of war,
the most important rests upon the tendency of groups to develop conflict-
ing interests and to struggle for their realization, by physical force if
necessary. It is alleged that this inevitable conflict of interests can
scarcely be eliminated by any degree of social progress.

Gustav Ratzenhofer, A. W. Small, A. F. Bentley, and others have
convincingly shown that the struggle of conflicting interest-groups is
even more prominent within each state than between different states.
Yet this struggle of groups within the state does not take the form of
physical conflict, but rather tends toward adjustment, and compromise.
If we developed the same degree of legal control in world society that
prevails within the boundaries of each state, there would no longer be
any need for national groups to resort to war to obtain their legitimate
desires. The constructive forms of social conflict must become economic,
cultural, and intellectual. This sort of competition may prove a stimulant
to progress, but physical combat will inevitably throw mankind back
toward primitive barbarism and misery.

Economic Causes of War. The Industrial Revolution produced an
enormous increase in the volume of commodities available for sale. The
older home markets proved inadequate for the increasing flood of goods.

I* See above, pp. 219 ff.

20 Perth, 1932.

21 Stokes, 1934.

334 WAR AND PEACE

It seemed necessary to find new markets overseas. In part, these markets
might be discovered among highly civilized peoples in distant lands, but
the industrialized countries also endeavored to develop or exploit colonies
as potential customers for goods manufactured in the mother country.

Next to the quest for markets, probably the most dynamic incentive
to imperialism, particularly in the last generation, has been the struggle
for control over the sources of raw materials. The zeal exhibited in the
effort to get command of oil and rubber supplies was but the most con-
spicuous contemporary manifestation of this struggle. As a result, most
of the areas which were not already under the dominion of independent
modern states by 1870 have been parceled out among the British, French,
Russians, Dutch, and Americans. This revived scramble for overseas
territory was one of the most potent causes of international disputes in
the fifty years before 1914.

The Industrial Revolution, in due time, created an extensive supply
of surplus capital that sought investment in overseas dominions. This,
in itself, was legitimate enough. But the investors demanded special pro-
tection and unique rights, independent of the laws and customs of the
country in which the investments were made. Extra-territorial rights
were established, which made the resident investors and their agents
free from the laws and courts of the exploited country. Each imperial-
istic state, in administering its laws abroad, is, naturally, biased in favor
of its own nationals.

In many cases, when the exploited state was weak enough in a political
or military sense to facilitate such oppression, foreign investors have
even induced their home governments to impose severe economic handi-
caps upon the country undergoing economic penetration. A notorious
example of such procedure was the limitation of the customs duties which
might be imposed on imports by the Chinese government. Chinese mer-
chants, shipping goods into foreign countries, were compelled to pay the
often extortionately high customs duties imposed on Chinese exports,
while the Chinese were themselves limited to notoriously low customs
rates on goods shipped into China. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and
other uprisings in China were very largely caused by the oppressive
activities of foreign investors, supported by the armed forces of their
home governments.

Even more serious has been the psychic intimidation and the military
or naval occupation of weaker states at the behest of investors. A man
who invests capital in some weak state may believe that his interests are
not adequately protected by the laws and institutions of the state in
which he is carrying on business, or he may find it difficult to collect his
debts in that country. He then hastens to the State Department or
Foreign Office of his home government and demands that his economic
and financial interests be protected by the army or marines of the mother
country. This procedure is a direct repudiation of the long established
practice in regard to domestic debts within any state. An investor at
home would never for a moment dream of requesting so preposterous

WAR AND PEACE 335

a thing as the use of the standing army to enable him to collect a debt.
The forceful occupation of weaker or dependent states in order to protect
investments or to collect the debts due to private citizens has produced
a large number of irritating and oppressive incidents in modern interna-
tional relations. Perhaps the most notorious have been our own relations
with various weak Latin-American countries, where our foreign policy
has been extensively dictated by the interests of our investors. But our
behavior is only a representative illustration of a nearly universal practice
on the part of the more powerful states of the modern world and their
financial moguls.

The economic causes of war will never be eliminated so long as the
archaic principle of the protective tariff remains an unabated nuisance.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a steady
movement toward free trade, but the rise of modern industrialism, na-
tionalism, and imperialism produced a strong reaction after 1870 in
favor of economic nationalism. However, even the most extreme ex-
ponents of the protective tariff then contended that it was desirable only
when it might help a developing industrial state to establish itself in a
condition of relative economic equality with more advanced states. As
Friedrich List himself admitted, there is no valid justification for pro-
tective tariffs among well-developed industrial states. Yet modern poli-
ticians and special economic interests have secured a nearly universal
adoption of the protective tariff system, which is nothing less than a form
of economic warfare. Particularly has this been true of the discrimi-
natory tariff arrangements which were common in Europe before the first
World War and which, in most cases, were continued in an even more
irritating form after that conflict officially terminated. The effort of
Secretary of State Cordell Hull to negotiate for agreements providing
for a mutual lowering of tariff rates has been highly commendable. But,
so far, it is a mere idealistic bubble on the surface of the vast ocean of
protectionism.

The basest of all the economic causes of war are those related to the
propaganda of munitions manufacturers — the "merchants of death."
Such organizations subsidize militaristic propaganda, support patriotic
societies, and contribute enthusiastically to the maintenance of speakers
and periodicals that are devoted to keeping the military cult forcefully
before the people. It has not been uncommon for munitions manufac-
turers to bribe foreign newspapers to print highly alarmist news in order
to stir up fear in their own country. This makes possible a larger appro-
priation for armament and munitions and thus increases government
orders.

Then there are the economic vultures who see in war an opportunity
for unique pecuniary profit, and are willing to urge a policy which leads
to enormous loss of life and an increase of general misery. Such persons
were particularly active in urging the United States to enter the first
World War and in demanding the continuance of the War until the Allied
troops stood in Berlin. A generation later they enthusiastically sup-

336 WAR AND PEACE

ported the program for a great armament and urged our entry into the
second World War long before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

It has long been apparent to intelligent economists that modern
methods of communication and transportation have tended to make the
world ever more an economic unit, characterized by interdependence and
a necessity for cooperation. But the archaic economic practices and
dogmas and the bellicose attitudes which have come down from an earlier
era prevent us from thinking and acting sanely in the field of world
economic relations.

Further, as Norman Angell warned before the first World War and fully
proved upon the basis of its results, a great war can no longer be a profit-
able one, even for the victors. The main hope for the mitigation of the
economic forces making for war is, on the one hand, the development
of an educational program designed to reveal the menace of economic
imperialism and the high protective tariff system and, on the other hand,
the gradual recognition on the part of the more intelligent and farsighted
bankers and businessmen that the old system is wrong-headed in its
notions and must be modified, if ultimate disaster is to be averted.

Economic maladjustment, poverty, misery and personal insecurity
contribute in various ways to the danger of war. These conditions en-
courage discontent, rioting, and threats of rebellion. Rulers are prone
to resort to war to distract attention from domestic discontent and to
galvanize the populace in patriotic support of a foreign war. Further,
a sense of insecurity, oppression, and desperation makes the under-
privileged willing to accept or gamble on the outcome of a war. They
reason that nothing could be worse than the present, while a war may
bring better times at its end. While it lasts, it provides excitement and
some kind of living. Hence, wars are likely to be most frequent when a
socio-economic system is disintegrating and misery is most rampant.
This cause of war also suggests that the elimination of war is intimately
linked up with the provision of social and economic justice.

Political Games of War. Among the most important of the political
causes of war is the modern national-state system, the psychological
results of which were mentioned above in connection with the military
cult and conventional patriotism. Largely as a result of the rise of
modern capitalism and the Protestant Reformation, the benign medieval
ecclesiastical dream of a great international organization, uniting most
of Europe, was replaced by the actuality of the modern national state.
The national state was first thoroughly legalized in European public law
in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The sovereign independence of
nationalities, in a political sense, was at first confined primarily to the
greater European states. The aspiration to attain independence soon
spread to the lesser peoples, and the nineteenth century was, in part,
taken up with their struggles for emancipation.

Because subject nationalities were frequently oppressed by the greater
states, political independence became regarded by these oppressed peoples
as necessary for the expression of the purely cultural fact of nationality.

WAR AND PEACE 337

The acceptance of this view promoted the creation of a large number of
small national states, which constitute just so much greater invitation to
war, unless brought within some world organization or some European
federation. The Treaty of Versailles carried to the logical extreme this
recognition of political nationalism — "international anarchy" — without
safeguarding the process by creating a strong international organization.
It is possible that nationalism may be adjusted to world organization,
but it must be a nationalism more temperate and conciliatory than that
which motivated and conditioned European psychology in the century
before the first World War and headed us toward the present conflict.

Next to its psychological expression in fanatical patriotism, the chief
reason why the national state has menaced peace and world order is the
fact that nationalism has been linked up with the conception of absolute
political sovereignty.22 This was a notion derived vaguely from Roman
law,23 but primarily developed by political philosophers from Bodin in
the sixteenth century, through Hobbes, Blackstone, Bentham, and Austin
to J. W. Burgess in our own day. In the words of Burgess, it means the
"original, absolute, unlimited, universal power of the state over the
individual subject and all associations of subjects." Such a political con-
cept, held to be the bulwark of the modern political order, has naturally
proved a nasty theoretical stumbling-block to any movement for world
organization. It has been maintained that any such plan would involve
some sacrifice of sovereignty and independence, and would, therefore,
pull down the whole edifice of modern political society in its wake.
Added to this metaphysical fetish has been the even more dubious notion
of "national honor" — a phrase normally used to cover supposedly non-
judicable topics and disputes.

This view of absolute political sovereignty is a purely metaphysical
fiction, the power of the state being, in both theory and practice, limited
by every treaty and international arrangement, as well as by the social
power exerted by various groups within the state. The concepts and
practices of political pluralism are already severely challenging the
theory of the omnipotent sovereign state.24 We may safely hold that
there is nothing in sound political science of the present time which con-
stitutes any obstacle to plans for an effective society of states. Yet the
fetish of the absolutely sovereign state still persists, to give pathological
sensitivity to many contemporary statesmen, when any program of
world unity is brought up for discussion.

The view that there are disputes which a state cannot submit to adjudi-
cation without a lesion of "national honor" is as misleading as it is to
contend that there are matters which a private individual should not
submit to the courts of law. The concept of "national honor" is not an

22 Cf. P. W. Ward, Sovereignty: A Study of a Contemporary Notion, Routlcdge,
1928.

23 See M. P. Gilmore, Argument from Roman Law iti Political Thought, 1200-1600,
Howard University Press, 1941.

24 See C. E. Merriam and H. E. Barnes, History of Political Theories: Recent Times,.
MacmUlan, 1924, chap, iiu

338 WAR AND PEACE'

asset to national dignity or world order, but an evidence of international
lawlessness, comparable to duelling and lynch-law within the state.

From a more dynamic point of view, Quincy Wright finds that there
are three main political causes of war: (1) an unjust or archaic legal
system, which fails to promote or protect the basic social and economic
interests within a state, thus giving rise to class or group resentment, and
producing a state of opinion hostile to the given situation and eager to
remedy it, by war if necessary; (2) an unstable equilibrium among the
states with a division of countries into "haves" and "have-nots"; and (3)
the lack of an adequate international organization to deal with conflicts
by legal rather than warlike methods.

An excellent schematic outline of the causes of war has been presented
by Carl V. Herron. It does not differ markedly from that of the fore-
going discussion of the so-called war system:

ECONOMIC

1. The "profit motive" (munitions manufacturing, commercial discrimination, high
tariffs, etc.)

2. Unequal distribution of wealth, international envy and greed, natural or artificial
disasters such as famines, etc.

POLITICAL

1. Imperialism

2. Nationalism

3. Dictatorship

4. Tyranny

RELIGIOUS

1. Prejudice, intolerance, etc.

2. Paganism

RACIAL

1. Prejudice

2. Minority problems

SOCIAL

1. Anti-social acts or ideologies

2. Treaty-breaking (or the imposition of unfair treaties)

3. Over-population

INTELLECTUAL

1. Ignorance

2. False propaganda

3. Mental slavery

4. The war cult.

The foregoing discussion of the more obvious fundamental causes of
war should show how broad any adequate program for securing world
peace must be.25 The pacifist has normally been a single-track reformer,
putting his trust in some one panacea, such as disarmament, outlawry of
war, international arbitration, international conferences, international
discussion clubs, religious unity, leagues of nations, free trade, non-
resistance, and so on. While every one interested in the cause of peace

25 See Quincy Wright, "The Causation and Control of War," in American Socio-
logical Review, August, 1938, pp. 461-474.

WAR AND PEACE 339

should be allowed to affiliate himself with whatever branch of the general
peace movement arouses his most enthusiastic support, he should under-
stand that his particular scheme will be helpful only as a part of a larger
whole. The more effectively we reduce the causes of war, the more likely
is outlawry or renunciation to succeed.

The Impact of War upon Society and Culture

The Axis powers have glorified war as a noble human enterprise. It
is held to purify our minds, to buck up our moral fiber and resolution, to
strengthen our bodies, to improve the quality of the race, and to bring
economic benefits which far outweigh the costs of war.

There is no denying the fact that war did bring certain important
benefits to mankind in the early days of social evolution. War put an
end to small primitive groups and was a powerful influence in creating
great states, which could introduce order on a large scale and secure
cooperative enterprise from extensive populations. No doubt war con-
tributed a good deal to the improvement of social discipline in early
historic society. In certain cases, war also paved the way for a greater
degree of peace than normally prevailed. This is illustrated by the
widespread peace brought to the realms within the Persian and Roman
empires. War also helped to put an end to feudalism and to create
national states in early modern times, thus making possible more orderly
existence and better protection of life and property.

War has also done something to stimulate the growth of science and
invention, from the days of stone weapons to those of the modern air-
bombers and submarines. Some examples are the Bessemer process of
making steel, to find a cheaper metal for cannon and other firearms, the
discovery of latent heat from boring out cannon, the origins of mass-
production in Eli Whitney's use of standardized parts in the manufacture
of muskets, the search for new alloys in recent times, and the progress
in antisepsis and surgery stimulated by the urgency of war. But prob-
ably all these contributions of war to scientific and technological progress
have been far more than offset by the destruction which war has wrought
through improved weapons.

Moreover, it may fairly be said that such benefits as war has brought
to society, outside of science and invention, were made mainly in centuries
prior to our own. Even then, it is probable that the advantages conferred
by war were outweighed by the damage to life, property, and human
happiness. War today is surely an almost unmitigated liability to con-
temporary civilization. If in the following pages we may present an
almost unrelieved picture of the disasters accompanying war, it is only
because we cannot discover any benefits which war brings to twentieth-
century society and culture.

War affects society in a profound and diversified fashion. It shifts
notably the relative prestige and power of leading social institutions.
The state and the army are elevated to a supreme position of reputation

340 WAR AND PEACE

and authority. Those institutions which are most important in peace
time, such as the family, community, church, school, and property, are
subordinated. Elevation of the state and the army to a position of
supremacy carries with it the necessity of unreasoning obedience to the
dictates of government. In extreme cases, the military establishment
may actually take over and dominate the government.

The institutions subordinated by war arc also disrupted in various
ways. The family is especially hard hit through the withdrawal of males
into the army, the death of wage earners on the battlefield, privation and
poverty among those who remain at home, and an all too frequent de-
moralization within the family. Prewar families are undermined or
broken up, and a large number of unstable war marriages are contracted,
which are often followed by divorce, desertion, and misery in the postwar
period.

The first World War demoralized the school system in a number of
ways. Interest was diverted to war-time activities. Sceptical tend-
encies were suppressed by war propaganda. Academic freedom was
lost, teachers were taken into war service, and excessive expenditures for
war purposes led to severe curtailment of appropriations for education.

The church is also perverted and degraded by war. In the first World
War, ministers of the gospel contributed their part to war propaganda
and brought the sanction of Christ to blood-letting. Preachers who in-
sisted on remaining true to their prewar convictions and continuing to
advocate pacific and tolerant notions got into serious difficulties. War-
mongering on the part of the church undermined its standing with
thoughtful persons when peace returned. There was a feeling that the
church had forfeited its claim to respect and trust.

Community attitudes and activities change notably during war. In-
terest in education, relief, music, and other community projects declines,
while various forms of war activities absorb the community. It devotes
itself to supporting the Red Cross, making bandages, promoting the sale
of government bonds, and carrying on war propaganda.

In peace time, property is the most sacred of all human institutions
in Capitalistic states. But war can even lessen the sanctity of property.
In war time, the state controls industry much more thoroughly than in
peace. The government determines the armament program and demands
that industry shall conform to it, even to the extent of ceasing the
production of peace-time commodities. Capital and labor may both be
regimented. The plants of stubborn employers are taken over, while
striking laborers may be threatened with prison terms. While it is rare
that a war produces outright confiscation of property, property rights
and holdings may be threatened by crushing taxation, limitation of
profits, and inflation.

Wars produce a tremendous waste of natural resources and productive
effort. The amount of the economic losses during the first World War,
about 350 billion dollars, was enough to have furnished: (1) every
family in England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, the United States,

WAR AND PEACE 341

Canada, and Australia with a $2,500 house on a $500 one-acre lot, with
$1,000 worth of furniture; (2) a $5,000,000 library for every community
of 200,000 inhabitants in these countries; (3) a $10,000,000 university
for every such community; (4) a fund that at 5 per cent interest would
yield enough to pay indefinitely $1,000 a year to an army of 125,000
teachers and 125,000 nurses, and (5) enough left over to buy every piece
of property and all wealth in France and Belgium at a fair market price.

Where the business classes are strong enough to maintain their control
over the government, even in war time, we are likely to have orgies of
profiteering at the expense of the government, the public, and the army.
Most of the great wars in the last century have produced war millionaires,
and the first World War created thousands of them.

Unfortunately, even the staggering initial cost of war is only the start.
Pensions, war-risk insurance, veterans' bonuses, and other economic
charges often far exceed the original cost of war. We paid out much
more in pensions to Civil War veterans and their dependents than the
war cost us from 1861 to 1865. The same is proving true of the financial
aftermath of the first World War. To June 30, 1941, the United States
Veterans' Administration had disbursed over 25 billion dollars.

Another serious economic result of war is the industrial dislocation it
produces. When wars are over, there is always great difficulty in shifting
from war-time activities to peace-time production, and in transforming
soldiers from a military to an industrial army. War may bring about
a sweeping economic revolution, as in Russia during the first World War.
Most other countries in western Europe narrowly escaped a similar post-
war revolution in 1918-1919; the revolution in Italy, in 1922, and in
Germany, in 1933, may be attributed to the impact of the first World War.

War conditions stimulate the major social evils. The moral break-
down in war time, the growth of a war-time morality, and the disruption
of family relations increase the extent of prostitution and unconventional
sex relations. Crime is increased as a result of the breakdown of normal
social control, the disorganization of family life, the increase of poverty,
and the demoralizing associations of war time. The loss of breadwinners
and the rise in the price of the necessities increase human misery and
swell the ranks of dependents. Their condition is rendered still more
deplorable by the fact that relief agencies are crippled during war time,
through the concentration of public interest and community expenditures
upon war projects. Wars leave in their wake a great mass of miserable
and maladjusted persons who create new and challenging problems for
social workers in the period of readjustment.

During war time the army tends to develop a morality all its own.
When sex relations within the family are disrupted, the soldiers substi-
tute loose sexual relations with "charity girls" and prostitutes. Even
normally virtuous girls frequently consort with soldiers, under the illusion
that they are rendering a patriotic service to their country. The new
laxity is often justified on the ground that it is contributing to the defeat
of the enemy. But perhaps the intolerance, cruelty, and brutality of

342 WAR AND PEACE

war psychology and war conduct may be regarded as greater breaches
of morality than sexual laxity.

Perhaps the most disastrous effect of war on human society is the
brutalization of the human race, as a result of ruthless massacres on
the battlefield, the starvation of women and children through blockades,
the irresponsible lying involved in war propaganda, and so forth. The
brutalizing effect of war has been impressively described by Andre
Maurois in an article on "The Tragic Decline of the Humane Ideal" in
the New York Times Magazine, June 19, 1938:

These completely useless massacres [of Chinese civilians] shock us, but we feel
powerless to stop thorn. We have lost not only our courage but our desire to
a<;t. The humane ideal, whose noble aims were generally respected before the
World War, has declined during the last ten years to a condition of primitive
violence and cruelty. We are again becoming accustomed to the ferocity of
which several centuries of civilization had seemed to cure the human race; and this
new barbarity is far more dangerous than that of the savages because it is armed
by science.

Picture a European couple who got married in 1913. In the present year,
1938, they are celebrating their silver wedding. Compare the world as it ap-
peared to this couple at the time of their marriage with the world that they now
live in, and you will realize what a terrifying decline has taken place. At nearly
every point the forces of civilization seem to be sounding a retreat. In 1913,
physical security for Europeans was assured. The idea that a town could be
half destroyed in a single night without declaration of war, that thousands of
women and children could be killed by bombs, nuns massacred by rioters, non-
belligerent ships torpedoed in the Mediterranean by pirates would have seemed
mad.

Civil and religious liberty, at least in western Europe, seemed to be safe from
attack. In no civilized country at that time would a man have been persecuted
for his beliefs. Only his actions, if they were against the law, would have
exposed him to punishment. Between country and country the movements of
persons and goods were free, trade was regular and profitable and currencies
maintained a more or less stable purchasing power.

A man who had saved during his working life could be confident that he would
be secure against poverty in his old age; fathers took steps to safeguard the
future of their children; in every class of society reasonable people made plans,
looked forward to their realization and believed in man's power over material
things and events. At the same time, moral influences were strong; even those
whd did not practice goodness and tolerance would not have dared to say in
public that these virtues were crimes; the growing wealth of society made social
reforms fairly easy; violence was praised only by a few fanatics and a few
theorists. The peace of Europe protected a great civilization. . . .

During the war of 1914, humanity once more served a gruesome apprenticeship
to violence. The tiger which has tasted blood no longer hesitates to attack man;
men who have learned to kill no longer have the same respect for human life. To
bombard an open town would have been criminal lunacy in 1913. But to us, in
193S, who have become familiar with the idea through war itself and through
photographs and films of warfare, it has become no more than an "unavoidable
necessity." 26

Wars can bring about profound changes in the mentality of popula-
tions. War propaganda stirs up emotions and arouses passions, some-

26 The New York Times Magazine, June 19, 1938.

WAR AND PEACE 343

times to such a degree that whole nations are turned into veritable mobs,
so that people become absorbed in war issues and are savagely intolerant
even of slight deviations of opinion. In the first World War, the most
ruthless and conscienceless lying was indulged in by those who directed
war propaganda; and the censorship in war time prevented any counter-
propaganda and eliminated any opportunity for truth to make itself felt.
Many civil liberties are suspended in war time and repressive laws are
passed, often contrary to the most fundamental principles of the country
in peace time. Conscientious objectors to war are often harshly dealt
with and in some instances have been slain.

War has disastrous effects on culture. The mind is distracted from
literature, music, and art and is directed to killing enemies and to sup-
porting the morale of those devoted to killing. Even such artistic effort
as continues is primarily devoted to arousing and sustaining hatred and
to bolstering army morale. Matters in point here are war music, war
posters, war drama, movies and the like. The war pictures and posters
of George Bellows in the first World War and of Thomas Hart Benton
in the second World War are good examples of the exploitation of art in
war time. Many cathedrals, libraries, and other great architectural mon-
uments may be ruthlessly bombed and burned, and art museums may be
destroyed or rifled. Scholarship tends to be debased. Even the ablest
scholars may descend to lying and misrepresentation in war propaganda.
Scholarly endeavor is devoted to the discovery of more efficient methods
of destruction, such as laboratory research into the potentialities of "germ
warfare" and the like.

It is often contended that, whatever the disastrous effects of war, at
least it hfl-s a beneficial biological influence upon the human race; that
it intensifies the struggle for existence and thus insures the survival of
the fittest. Such a contention might have been true of the wars among
savages, where physical strength and bravery played a major role in the
outcome of battle. Today, however, our mechanized war is no biological
struggle; it is a conflict of technology and psychology. A battalion of
dwarfs, with armored tanks, could put to flight tens of thousands of
brave giants armed only with rifles or cutlasses. In fact, war tends to
reduce the physical quality of the population by drawing off the best
types among the males of the population, to be murdered in mass by our
contemporary instruments for dealing out death.

Wars also increase the frequency and deadliness of disease. The con-
gregation of soldiers from various parts of the world starts epidemics.
Typhus is essentially a war epidemic. Some say the influenza epidemic
of 1918 killed more persons than the Black Death of the late Middle Ages.
Venereal disease and dysentery become more frequent in war time. In
the first World War some 7 million days of service were lost by American
soldiers as a result of venereal disease. Some 339,000 soldiers, the equiv-
alent of 23 divisions, were treated for venereal disease. The reduction
of vitality, through impoverishment and through starvation due to block-
ades and the like, tends to make disease more deadly. Many doctors are

344 WAR AND PEACE

drawn away for army service and medical care becomes inadequate for
civilians.

Mental disorders also become more numerous in war time. What was
called "shell-shock" in the first World War is a mental disease caused by
tense war-time conditions. Nearly a quarter of a million soldiers were
discharged from the British army alone during the first World War be-
cause of mental disease. Many of the shell-shocked and deranged
soldiers failed to recover and became chronically insane. Thousands of
such cases are segregated in veterans' hospitals and other institutions for
the mentally ill.

Battlefield mortality and disease enormously increase the death rate.
At the same time, the birth rate is usually lowered because the more
vigorous males in the procreative ages are taken away from home for
long periods. Other males are wounded, maimed, and reduced in vitality.
In northern and western Europe, the birth rate dropped from 24.2 for the
years 1911-1914 to 17.0 for the years 1915-1919, a falling off of about
30 per cent. The effect is continued as the younger and more vigorous
males are killed off. In the first World War, 72 per cent of German
military deaths and 55 per cent of the French were of men under 30
years of age. Malnutrition and poverty decrease the fertility of women
and increase infant mortality. One of the reasons for the marked
slowing-up of population growth after 1920 was the impact of the first
World War upon population trends.

War hastens social change and promotes social revolutions. Wars
ended tribal society and hastened the decline of the Roman Empire.
They ended Feudalism and set up the national state. They spread the
principles of the French Revolution. They brought Communism to
Russia and Fascism to Italy and Germany. The second World War
may bring about the destruction of many of our modern institutions.
While social change is not always to be deplored, it is certainly far better
to have it brought about, if possible, by orderly and civilized reforms
instead of the violence and hysteria of war time. Social change pro-
duced by war is not only cruel and wasteful but it may also promote
reaction and counter-revolutions that place in jeopardy whatever gains
have been made.

One of the worst results of war is its effect upon peace. The state of
mind produced by war makes it almost impossible to negotiate a just and
constructive peace treaty at the war's end. Hatreds are so intense that
the victors are impelled to impose a vindictive peace upon the vanquished,
producing resentment and a desire for revenge. In this way, the peace
which follows one war becomes a cause of the next war. This was not-
ably the case with the first World War, though Woodrow Wilson had
sought to avoid any such result. While many other factors contributed
to the coming of the second World War, no informed and fair-minded
person can very well doubt that the fundamental cause of the second
World War was the postwar treaties of 1919. Thus wars tend to breed
wars, in endless succession and confusion.

WAR AND PEACE 345

Prelude to the Second World War

The threat of war, which hung over the world between the the two
world wars, was by far the most ominous single aspect of the world-
crisis. If peace could be preserved, there was some chance that we might
bridge the gulf between machines and institutions and preserve civiliza-
tion. But another devastating world war intervened.

The war threat of the last decade rested on many stubborn foundations.
There was the old war system, compounded of nationalism, imperialism,
secret diplomacy, and the like, which brought about the World War of
1914. This system was not modified in any important way after 1919.
Its spirit permeated the peace settlement at Paris and postwar diplomacy.

The basis for a new war was laid by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Never was a greater opportunity presented to man to use generosity and
statesmanship in the interest of permanent peace, and never was an
opportunity for good turned down more completely and ruthlessly. All
the war ideals of the Entente were brazenly betrayed. The defeated
nations were shamefully treated, both morally and materially. In the
end, the handicaps placed by the victorious Allies upon the German
Republic destroyed it. The resentment over the Versailles settlement
encouraged the German people to rally to Hitler when he promised to
destroy the Versailles system — a promise which he kept, only to replace
it by something which soon appeared to be far worse for both Germany
and the world.

We had been promised that the War would end great armaments,
terminate secret diplomacy, curb nationalism, create a world-state,
outlaw war, and make the world safe for democracy.

The armament race after the first World War was more feverish and
extensive than before 1914. In 1938, the world spent about sevenfold
more on armaments than in 1913, the last prewar year. In 1913 the
armament expenditures were about $2,500,000,000. By 1932 they stood
at $4,000,000,000; in 1936, at $11,000,000,000; in 1938 at $17,000,000,000;
and in 1939 at about $20,000,000,000. But the armament expenditures
during the second World War made those of 1939 seem almost a disarm-
ament budget. The United States, alone, appropriated $160,000,000,000
between June, 1940, and March, 1942.

A number of conferences on disarmament, such as that in Washington
in 1921-1922, the Geneva conference of 1927, the London conferences of
1929-1930 and 1935-1936, and the Geneva conference of 1932-1934, all
proved completely futile. As we just pointed out, the world was in 1939
spending nearly ten times as much on armaments as in 1913. Never
before did the world spend as much in getting ready for mass murder.

In the period after the first World War, much attention was devoted
to the armament industries and to their propaganda against disarma-
ment and world peace. These industries included the manufacturers of
powder, high explosives, bullets, shells, cannon, rifles, and other materials,
used directly in battle, and also shipbuilding firms, steel companies, and
the like, that build war vessels and similar instruments of combat.

346 WAR AND PEACE

Public interest was aroused by the senatorial investigation of the
activities of one W. B. Shearer at the Geneva Arms Conference of 1927.27
It was revealed that Mr. Shearer had been engaged in propaganda for
steel and shipbuilding interests that were pushing the "big navy" cam-
paign. He wrote articles and made speeches in behalf of naval expan-
sion, conducted a lobby at Geneva against disarmament and in support
of a large American navy, attempted to manipulate American politics in
favor of armament expansion, and organized a comprehensive campaign
of propaganda against the League of Nations, the World Court, and other
pacific agencies. Shearer actually boasted that he was largely respon-
sible for breaking up the Geneva Disarmament Conference.

Even more excitement was produced in the summer of 1934 when
Senator Gerald P. Nye's investigating committee revealed the activities,
among others, of the international "mystery man," Sir Basil Zaharoff,
who was shown to have received large sums for his multifarious and
devious doings in promoting the sale of various munitions of war, espe-
cially submarines. Much popular interest was also promoted during
the same year by the publication of two forceful books on the armament
industry, Merchants of Death 28 by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanig-
hen, and Iron, Blood and Profits 29 by George Seldes.

There is little doubt about the extensive character of the armament
industry, its powerful propaganda, its insidious lobby, and its utter un-
scrupulousness in search of profits, not stopping short of selling munitions
that were obviously destined to deal out death to fellow citizens. Yet,
as Engelbrecht and Hanighen make clear, it is a mistake to blame the
armament manufacturers alone for keeping alive the war system or to
imagine that the closing of every armament factory in the world would
end war. It is deeper forces, such as patriotism, imperialism, national-
istic education, and capitalistic competition, that really cause wars.

Nor is the greed of armament manufacturers at all unique. They
simply follow the universal principles of finance capitalism, the theory
of business enterprise, and the profit system. If British tank-makers
hastened to sell Soviet Russia tanks when the British government was
about to break off relations with Russia, so did leading moguls of finance
capitalism sell short the stock of their own banks. If British airplane
companies were ready to sell airplanes to Hitler, so did certain American
corporation presidents make vast profits at the expense of their own stock-
holders. The armament propaganda and its serpentine manipulations
should be relentlessly exposed, but friends of disarmament will have to go
further afield if they wish to achieve success in ending war.

Secret diplomacy and international duplicity went on as before, despite
the formal requirement that treaties must be registered with the League
of Nations. There were thirty national states in Europe in 1939, as

2TSee C. A. Beard, Navy: Defense or Portent? Harper, 1932, chap. v.
28 Dodd, Mead, 1934.
» Harper, 1934.

WAR AND PEACE 347

against eighteen in 1914. And each of these was as blatantly patriotic
as were the fewer countries existent in 1914. Not only had psychological
nationalism been intensified; economic nationalism had grown apace.
The League of Nations was only a weak preliminary step toward a
world-state, and it is today completely discredited by its failure to stand
steadfastly against the aggression of Japan, of Italy, and of Germany.
War was not outlawed, and the Kellogg Pact turned out to be colossal
international hypocrisy. The reservations to the Pact made its terms
inapplicable to any probable type of war. Democracy was in greater
eclipse, both in theory and in practice, before the second World War
started than at any time since the collapse of the Revolutions of 1848.

Economic factors since 1918 played their part in drawing Europe
nearer to war. Tariff walls became ever higher and more numerous.
Certain countries, such as Britain, France, and the United States, had
large colonial empires or many areas of "special interest." This gave
them markets and raw materials. Other great states — Japan, Italy,
and Germany — had no comparable outlets and resources. After 1930,
Japan and Italy, by bluffing their antagonists, carved out for themselves
more extensive colonial possessions. Then Germany moved in 1938, and
her attempt to expand supplied the spark which set off the long-threatened
war. Certainly, as Simonds and Emeny have done well to emphasize, so
long as the great powers were divided relatively into the "haves" and the
"have-nots," there could be little hope of permanent peace. And it seems
that the situation could not be remedied without war.

The Spanish civil war showed how preliminary wars could be fought
without formally involving all of Europe. The Spanish rebel campaign
would have amounted to little without the aid of Germany and Italy.
Since the Loyalist forces received some assistance from Russia and
France, there is some justification for calling the Spanish civil war the
"little world war." It was a "try out" for what came after September,
1939.

In the light of these developments, it would have required almost a
miracle to have prevented war. Powerful forces made for war, while
almost none of any consequence worked against it. The usual argument
against the prospect of war was based on the belief that the great powers
would not fight, for fear of the frightful consequences of the new war
machinery. But this was a futile argument — one which has been vainly
advanced ever since the invention of gunpowder.

It is probable that a firm alliance of Britain, France, Russia, and the
United States at any time before 1939 could have preserved peace. Hitler
and Mussolini could scarcely have been so foolish as to risk war against
such a formidable coalition of powers. But not even the threat of a fatal
war could drive these great liberal and radical powers into effective
alliance. Indeed, the British government and ruling classes deliberately
strengthened and encouraged Hitler, so that he would be a bulwark
against Soviet Russia.

The second World War came in 1939, and so incalculable appeared

348 WAR AND PEACE

its potential consequences, that no dependable prediction could be made
regarding man's future, except that it was likely to be far different from
the present.

The Social Revolution Behind the Second World War

If we want to understand what caused the second World War and
where it is leading us we must dig deeper than the diplomatic stupidity
of the democracies or the bellicosity of the dictators. The war came in
1939 because of the failure to bring our institutional life up to date
through applying to it the same degree of intelligence that we have
made use of in the scientific laboratory and in the realm of mechanical
invention.

The gulf between our machines and institutions had suggested the
need of readjustment even before the close of the nineteenth century.
The first notable effort to accomplish something along this line took
place in the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck intro-
duced a comprehensive program of social legislation — social insurance,
labor laws, and the like — which was designed to adjust German society
to the Industrial Revolution and reduce the appeal of Socialism. His
program was continued and extended under William II. The growth of
the Social Democrats held some promise of a trend towards democracy
in imperial Germany.

In England, a Liberal-Labor coalition carried through comparable
reforms under democratic auspices between 1905 and 1914. English
government diiring this decade may well be held to represent the most
successful attempt of democracy in bridging the gulf between machinery
and society. In France, stimulated by a great socialist, Jean Jaures,
there was also a considerable effort to bring institutions up to date through
progressive social legislation. In the United States, there was a rever-
beration of this same trend in the so-called "Square Deal" program of
Theodore Roosevelt. In the Australasian colonies of Great Britain there
were advanced experiments in progressive social legislation. Consider-
able progress was also being made in approaching war in a rational
fashion. Civilized persons were coming to understand that war is the
most dangerous anachronism among all our institutional vestiges, and
that a better method of adjusting world affairs must be provided. The
Hague Court encouraged arbitration. Norman Angell was telling us, in
his The Great Illusion, that wars are too expensive to fight. Andrew
Carnegie was giving away his millions to promote the cause of peace.
Nicholas Murray Butler was carrying on peace propaganda. William
Jennings Bryan was negotiating arbitration treaties.

It is possible that then the gulf between machines and institutions might
have been bridged by gradual and civilized reforms. But the war of
1914 rudely put an end to peaceful domestic reforms, brought about the
most deadly conflict of all time, and set the stage for social revolutions
of unprecedented scope and violence.

In Great Britain, the Liberal party was destroyed as a major political

WAR AND PEACE 349

force. The Labor party did not have the strength or experience to take
over England. Britain lapsed into ineptitude and stagnation under a
smug and blind Tory domination. Jaures was assassinated in France just
before the war broke out and no other great French leader stepped into
his shoes. France became more nationalistic and reactionary. It was
devoted primarily to holding the ill-gotten gains of Versailles rather than
to solving the problems of the French economy. Even the well-inten-
tioned Popular Front under Leon Blum came too late to accomplish
anything significant and it lacked both courage and realism. The old
monarchial government in Germany was overthrown , and the new
Republic was too severely handicapped by the penalties of defeat to
carry on effectively. In the United States we passed from the promising
"New Freedom" of Woodrow Wilson into the shockingly inefficient and
corrupt "normalcy" of Warren Harding and the Ohio Gang, and the even
more dangerous "sleeping sickness" of the Coolidge era.

The economic cost of the first World War, amounting to the astronom-
ical figure of $350,000,000,000, piled up great war debts. Crushing taxa-
tion to pay these off left little money for reform measures. The reaction-
aries in control of European states became more fearful of change and
more adamant in their stupid resistance to reform. The Tories in Eng-
land and the Conservatives in France became hysterical in their fear of
Russia, and actually supported Hitler in the hope that he would present
a formidable bulwark against Bolshevism. The victors in the first World
War decided to hold their gains, even of they had to fight a second world
war to do so. They spent more money than ever on armament, even
though they had disarmed Germany and were not faced with any imme-
diate danger.

It is in this frustration of reform and orderly progress by the first
World War that we must seek the fundamental causes of the second
World War. Since the Industrial Revolution, whenever any country has
been reduced to desperation and crisis, it must resort to rapid and violent
efforts to bridge the gulf between machines and institutions. Since the
first World War, the result has been what we know as Totalitarianism —
the crisis form of government and economy. As Lindsay Rogers pointed
out long ago, totalitarianism is the natural and all-but-inevitable response
to social desperation in our day.30

The impact of the first World War upon the rotten imperialism and
feudalism of Tsarist Russia brought this archaic system down in ruins
in 1917. The Bolsheviks took advantage of the crisis and set up a
thoroughgoing Totalitarianism of the Left. After 1917, the Bolsheviks
made a terrific effort rapidly to bridge the gulf between machines and
institutions under Marxian guidance.

Italy was impoverished and disillusioned by the first World War, and
its government after the war lacked the courage, resolution and vision
to take matters in hand under socialist auspices. The response there to

80 Lindsay Rogers, Crisis Government, Norton, 1934.

350 WAR AND PEACE

desperation and disintegration was the Fascist program of Mussolini
and his Black Shirts. They set up the first Totalitarianism of the Right
and sought earnestly to bridge the gulf according to Fascist patterns.

The German Republic was broken mainly by the vindictive penalties
imposed upon it at Versailles in 1919. But the inefficiency and waste of
the government itself must share the responsibility for the failure. When
it was reduced to economic desperation by 1932, the natural response was
Hitler, with his brown shirts and Swastikas. The Nazis have bridged the
gulf between machines and institutions with a speed and ruthlessness un-
matched elsewhere. But they also revived and extolled the war system
to a degree unequaled since early modern times. Thus, their achieve-
ment in bridging the gulf has been an expensive failure, since war is the
institutional antiquity most disastrous to existing society.

The first World War thus produced three ruthless totalitarian experi-
ments which forcefully challenged what we regard as the fundamental
modern institutions of nationalism, democracy, and capitalism. To meet
the challenge, there was only an unrivaled collection of dry rot and
dead wood, the natural outcome of frustrated progress.

In the great democracies of England and France, there was a disheart-
ening spectacle of economic decline, the lack of a united front in facing
public problems, stupid resistance to reform, and internal corruption.
Diplomatic ineptitude and feebleness predominated. Foreign policies
were dictated by the desire to protect the financial interests of a wealthy
and effete minority rather than by a determination to render the country
immune to military attack. Reckless gambling in world affairs took the
place of rational diplomacy.

Orderly progress, following the prewar pattern, was to be observed only
in the small Scandinavian states and in Finland and Czechoslovakia.
The achievements of these states along the so-called "Middle-Way"
patterns of social change were impressive indeed, but these countries
were too small to count in determining the trend of world affairs in
Europe.

In its most fundamental sense, the second World War represents the
inevitable clash of totalitarian desperation with democratic dry rot.
The democracies were too stupid and fearful either to get on living terms
with the totalitarians and make reasonable concessions to them, or to
crush them by military force while it was still possible.

Had Europe been able to avoid the second World War, the bridging of
the gulf between machines and institutions might have proceeded more
slowly and the violence attendant thereupon might have been greatly
reduced. As it is, the second World War has not only brought on the
crisis far more quickly, but it has greatly accelerated the tempo of social
change. It seems likely that the decade following 1939 will bring about
or set in motion social transformations more vital and far-reaching than
those which have taken place in any previous century. It required two
centuries to bring about the change from medievalism to modern society
in England, where the transformation was the most rapid. It may turn

WAR AND PEACE 351

out that the transition from modern society to whatever new era lies
ahead will be effected in a very few years, perhaps less than a decade.

So far as Europe and the Old Word are concerned, it already appears
that the new era will be fashioned according to totalitarian patterns, no
matter which side wins the second World War. France, in defeat, has
already taken long strides towards totalitarianism. In order to conduct
the war efficiently, Britain has gone over to an extreme form of state
control in all phases of life. Win or lose, there is not much prospect of
Britain's return to the type of democratic and capitalistic form of social
organization that existed in 1939.

As we entered the war, we adopted a totalitarian way of life in order
to wage war more effectively, with only slight probability that we could
put off the totalitarian coat at the war's end. Thus, whatever the out-
come of the current conflict in Europe, we face a new world pattern.
The society and civilization of the future is likely to differ as greatly from
that of Jeffersonian democracy or Gladstonian liberalism as these did
from the society and culture of Louis XIV.

It would require a reckless man to dogmatize on what will emerge
when the war is over and the world-revolution of our day is relatively
complete. Had Britain won a fairly rapid victory with our aid, it would
have been possible to revamp democracy and capitalism on a just and
efficient pattern, an achievement already made by Sweden. It would
also have been possible to create a federation of Europe which might
assure world peace for generations.

A quick victory by the Nazis would have brought a ruthless but effi-
cient consolidation of the Old World, with spheres of interest assigned to
the main Axis powers. The military socialism of the Nazis would prob-
ably have been replaced by a "bread-and-circus" regime unparalleled in
human history. This would probably raise living standards, but at the
price of eliminating the blessings of liberty and free government.

A long war and a stalemate might lead to a virtual triumph for Soviet
Russia and state socialism, unless Russia were exhausted. If the war is
long drawn out and it ends in a stalemate, with no power or group of
powers strong enough to make and execute a constructive peace settle-
ment, then only chaos could be the immediate result.

If chaos is averted, the war is likely to bring about a far greater degree
of state control over economic life, more expert but more bureaucratic
government, the extinction of the full independence of small states, inter-
national consolidation, and a hard-boiled public psychology which will
retard the restoration of the finer humane values for many years to
come.81

81 For the most competent forecast of the probable results of the second World
War, see W. H. Chamberlin, "The Coming Peace," in The American Mercury,
November, 1940; and by the same author, "War — Shortcut to Fascism," ibid.,
December, 1940.

352 WAR AND PEACE

We may well conclude this chapter on war in our time by quoting the
ringing denunciation of war as a system by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt
in the spring of 1942:

It is still difficult for me to see any reason for a war among peoples in this
twentieth century, when human beings are supposed to have progressed in in-
telligence arid civilization. The ramifications of war arc so enormous many
innocent people will suffer and we will all pay the price in one way or another.
It chills me to my soul to think of the best of our young men going off to die or
to return crippled in mind and body.

Out of this terrific waste of human life must come a realization and a determi-
nation on the part of people all over the world that no one really wins a war,
and that today's territorial gains provide the fertile field for a future war. No
peoples want war. It is the governments who precipitate them, and for future
peace the peoples must govern themselves. We must all work for universal
understanding.82

ss Quoted in The Arbitrator, May, 1942. p. 3.

CHAPTER XI
Law and Justice as a Social Problem

Our Lawyer-Made Civilization

IN THIS and the following chapter we shall deal with some of the more
important social problems which arise out of law and its administration
in the United States in our day.* The most pressing social problems
related to law and the administration of justice are, of course, the out-
growth of weaknesses and deficiencies in our legal and judicial system.
Hence, we shall be primarily concerned with defects in law and current
legal procedure. Good laws and their efficient execution do not usually
create serious problems. We take for granted the important social serv-
ices rendered by law and the courts, and freely concede the indispensable
social functions of wise legislation and the fair and competent adminis-
tration of justice. The surest way to secure better laws and more equable
and certain justice is to expose fearlessly the prevalence of foolish and
unjust laws and the arbitrary, incompetent, and unfair administration of
law by our courts.

As in treating public health we have to deal chiefly with the problem of
disease and the defects in medical service, so here we must treat mainly
the grievous deficiencies of our system of laws and their execution. We
do not propose to terminate medicine because disease still persists ; we do,
however, criticize inadequacies in medical service which make possible a
far greater volume of disease and death than is at all necessary in our day.
Likewise, we recognize the indispensable character of law and legal insti-
tutions. But society cannot profit to the maximum by their services so
long as the present weaknesses and corruption in legal procedure- continue.
We are not at all concerned with sensational muck-raking or scandal-
mongering. We are only interested in exposing the usual and common-
place defects in the administration of law which are well-known to all
competent students of the problem and are universally recognized and
condemned by upright lawyers. Unusual cases of legal incompetence and
corruption make good reading, but they cannot be fairly regarded as
prevalent and extremely significant examples of legal deficiencies.

This discussion is merely a restrained description of the legal process as
it goes on in our day. Having had an unusual opportunity to enjoy the
friendship and confidence of lawyers, from some of the most eminent law
school deans, jurists and judges of the day to others who are frankly
associated with racketeers and ambulance-chasing, the writer has had

*This chapter has been read and criticized by an eminent student of legal pro-
cedure, two distinguished professors of law, and a brilliant law school student.

353

354 LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

special advantages in obtaining an account of the present state of the law
from those who are in the best possible position to know about it. But
the material in these pages is chiefly derived from printed sources, readily
accessible and set forth by legal scholars of the highest reputation.

Law and lawyers are today the most important directive element in our
civilization. Our technique of production, transportation, and commu-
nication may be determined and controlled by science and machinery, but
our institutional life is dominated by law and lawyers. We hear much
talk about "our scientific age/' "our industrial society," "our mechanical
civilization/' and "our empire of machines." Nevertheless, ours is still a
lawyer-made civilization, and one made by jurisprudence which reached
its present character by 1825, before most of the great scientific and
mechanical advances had taken place. But lawyers today stand in awe
and reverence before these laws that reflect an earlier civilization, one
which resembled that of Rameses II and Bargon more than it does our
urban-industrial world culture. In other words, we are bound down, in
the second third of the twentieth century, by legal theories and practices
that accumulated in the vast reach of time between the Swiss Lake-
dwellers and Andrew Jackson. There have been many new laws passed
since 1825, but "The Law/' as Fred Rodell calls it, has not changed. A
good lawyer of 1825 could appear effectively in any ordinary court today
without any additional legal education. A surgeon of 1825 would hardly
qualify for admission to one of our better butcher-shops, to say nothing of
a first-class city hospital.

Ours is as much a lawyer-made civilization, on its institutional side, as
the civilization of Assyria and Rome was a military one, and that of the
Middle Ages a religious one. The lawyers of today are the political
priests who control our civilization as thoroughly as the Catholic priests
dominated medieval institutional life. The United States Supreme
Court in 1930 could fairly be compared with the medieval papacy under
Innocent III. That it is now headed towards the declining status of the
papacy under Boniface VIII is not so certain, though it seems probable.

Lawyers made our government in 1787 and they have run it ever since.
Mogt of our presidents and legislators, and nearly all judges, have been
lawyers. Lawyers not only administer and interpret our laws after they
are made, but they take the lead in making them. These lawyer-made
laws control our institutions and conduct, from corporations to divorce
and from real property to prohibition and gambling. The utilization of
the machines in our factories is controlled as much by constitutional and
statutory law as by the laws of mechanics. Laws have organized and
directed capitalism and thus supplied the pattern of our economic life.
The basic economic problems of our age, which we discussed at the outset
of Chapter V, arise mainly because our potential mechanical economy
of abundance is transformed by archaic laws into an actual economy
of scarcity. Many of the problems of property which we analyzed
pearlier grow out of law and lawyers, though we need not ignore the social
and economic issues involved. Our moral values and personal behavior
are mainly determined and executed by means of law.

LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM 355

Since legal education and court practice are based on the theory of, and
adherence to, precedents, the tendency is to keep the law fixed and rigid
and to encourage lawyers to exert their influence to prevent our civili-
zation from changing. Yet, to keep pace with new social concepts and
scientific discoveries, we have to alter our laws and adapt them to new
conditions. If we are to avoid revolution, we must achieve orderly re-
form through adequate laws. Law will need to be transformed from a
priesthood of stagnation and privilege into a science of social and eco-
nomic engineering. This view and function of law is urged by progres-
sive jurists like Dean Roscoe Pound and Jerome Frank. Ferdinand
Lundberg clearly emphasizes the preeminent role exerted by law and
lawyers in shaping our life today:

The small body of approximately 175,000 practitioners, active and inactive, that
constitutes the legal profession in the United States probably plays, in its softly
insinuating fashion, a much more weighty social role than do editors or publishers,
physicians or surgeons, educators or labor leaders, and perhaps even financiers or
politicians. Lawyers may not in many cases make the final decisions that are of
great moment to society; but they do give the final decisions of financiers, indus-
trialists, labor leaders and politicians intellectual implementation to the end that
they shall be accepted by a public conditioned to react favorably to the legalistic
vocabulary.1

He quotes approvingly the opinion of Edward S. Robinson to the effect
that "the lawyers, whether judges, counsellors or scholars, represent the
dominant social philosophy of our day." 2

Leading Stages in the Evolution of Law

Primitive Law. There are innumerable definitions of law, but prob-
ably as clear and serviceable a one as we could find would regard law as
the publicly enforceable rules of human conduct and social behavior which
prevail in any country at any given time. Certain of the folkways and
mores governing conduct may be enforced merely by the pressure of pub-
lic opinion. Others have behind them the power of the state. The latter
are what we customarily regard as law. There are many theories as to
the source of law, some regarding it as the product of divine wisdom,
others as a universal expression of natural norms, and still others as the
outgrowth of legislation and judicial opinions. The latter is the only
practical definition which need concern us, though we recognize that legis-
lation is invariably the outgrowth of social customs and public opinion.8

Primitive peoples, properly speaking, possessed no written law.4 Prim-
itive law existed in the form of customary usages transmitted orally and

1 "The Legal Profession," Harper's, December, 1938, p. 2.

2 Ibid. For more details on this matter, see E. S. Robinson, Law and the Lawyers,
Macmillan, 1935.

8 For good introductory accounts of the history of law, see J. M. Zane, The Story
of Law, Ives Washburn, 1927; and W. A. Robson, Civilization and the Growth of
Law, Macmillan, 1935. Somewhat more scholarly is William Seagle, The Quest
for Law, Knopf, 1941.

4 Cf . Robson, op. cit., Chaps. VIII-XI.

356 LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

rigorously enforced by the pressure of the groups. Primitive law was any
social rule or usage that imposed a penalty for any infringement of group
rules. It was the general assumption by primitives that their customary
usages were revealed by the gods. These customs were, thus, believed to
represent the divine will with respect to all the details of human conduct.
Since primitive man regarded his gods as the dispensers of all the "luck"
and good fortune which he experienced, he could not very well afford to
ignore any infractions of the social codes of the group. Such infractions
were insults to the benevolent masters of the spiritual world.

Thus the unwritten primitive codes of usages were usually obeyed far
more literally and meticulously than are our modern legal codes; prim-
itives punished crimes with expedition and ferocity ; and many interesting
ceremonies were connected with the punishment of violations of group
rules. Penalties were designed to show the gods that the group in no
sense tolerated criminal acts which evoked divine displeasure and thus
threatened the safety and security of the group.

In primitive times criminal law was more important than civil law.
The crimes in primitive society fell into three main classes: (1) those
which violated the taboos or usages of the local community or the gentile
group as a whole; (2) the crimes which primarily concerned the smaller
family group; and (3) injuries wrought by one group upon another.

Among crimes of the first class were the violation of exogamy (incest) ,
witchcraft, treason, and cowardice. Parricide and adultery illustrate the
second class of crimes. The third class of crimes included any form of
injury done by a member of an adjoining clan or gens. It comprised,
besides the normal crimes of contemporary society, some relatively slight
modern offenses. Slander, for example, was a very serious offense in
primitive times. An injury to members of an adjoining clan was not
regarded as a crime by the group to which the perpetrator of the crime
belonged. The punishment for such an act was inflicted by the members
of the group of the injured person, according to the principles of blood
feud.

Among primitive peoples, the systems of evidence with which we are
familiar today were lacking. Only among certain African tribes do there
seem to be traces of a practice resembling the modern jury trial for ascer-
taining guilt or innocence. Even among the ruder primitive peoples,
however, definite methods of ascertaining the truth of an accusation or the
merits of a dispute were in evidence. Such methods usually bore a heavy
magico-religious coloring. Guilt or innocence was usually determined by
oaths, the ordeal, or trial by battle.

Always the problem of guilt was indirectly referred to the gods. Oaths
did not involve direct testimony, but simply a declaration on the part of
the oath-taker of the innocence or guilt of the accused. It was widely
believed that a perjurer would be punished by the gods. The ordeal was
carried out in various ways. A man might be required to carry a heated
stone in his bare hand. If the burns healed rapidly, the gods were sup-

LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM 357

posed to have intervened to prove his innocence. If the wounds healed
slowly, the gods were regarded as having indicated the guilt of the ac-
cused. Likewise, in trial by battle, victory was awarded by the gods to
the innocent party, irrespective of his personal strength or skill.

We may be contemptuous of such crude institutions as the ordeal, but
the modern jury is hardly more likely to bring accurate conclusions as to
guilt or innocence in important criminal cases. The present jury system
rests on psychological and logical fallacies as glaring as any religious
superstitions which earlier supported the primitive ordeal.

Primitive punishments were, for the most part, either exile or some form
of corporal punishment. They were designed to deter others from subse-
quent commission of crimes, and also to show to the gods the group's dis-
approval of the violation of its customary usages. Exile was extremely
terrifying to the one dismissed from the group, for he was at the mercy of
human enemies as well as of the spiritual world. Corporal punishments
were usually based upon the lex talionis principle of "an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth." Often, when the penalty was imposed through
a method identical with that employed in the execution of the crime, the
practice went to ludicrous extremes. L. T. Hobhouse tells of a case where
a man was killed by another who jumped out of a tree upon his victim.
As punishment for the crime, the culprit was taken beneath the same tree.
A representative of the kin of the deceased mounted the tree and, to his
own imminent peril, repeatedly jumped down upon the murderer until the
latter was killed.

Where the practice of blood feud existed, crimes committed by a
member of one clan against a member of another might lead to prolonged
disastrous consequences. For example, if an offense was committed by a
member of clan A against a member of clan B, the latter clan was
entitled to avenge itself against any member of clan A. In turn, clan A
would then avenge itself in the same manner upon clan B. As a conse-
quence of one initial crime, whole groups might be wiped out. The blood
feud was, to say the least, a wasteful process. It was an epoch-making
step when the practice of blood feud came to be averted by composition —
that is, the payment of a definite fine in compensation for the injury
suffered. This fine was called, among the primitive Germans, wergeld.
Many primitive societies had a fully worked-out schedule, imposing a
definite wergeld for any and all possible injuries done to every class in
society from nobles to slaves. It was also applied to injuries within the
group.

With the development of writing and the rise of political society, inevi-
table and sweeping changes followed in the nature of the law. Public
justice gradually supplanted private justice, and codes of oral custom
were transformed into imposing bodies of written law.

Let us not be too contemptuous of primitive law. A large element of
chance exists in our present administration of justice. In fact, we have
largely lost a praiseworthy element of primitive law, namely, restitution

358 LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

to the party injured by a crime. In modern society this can be secured
only by the institution of a civil suit against the criminal — a rather rare
procedure, though it is becoming increasingly prevalent.

The Code of Hammurabi. The next important stage in the evolution
of law is found in the legal ideals and practices in the ancient Near Orient.
Here the great monument to legal history is the Code of Hammurabi, the
leading king of early Babylonia.5 His code was found at Susa in 1901 by
the French scholar Jacques de Morgan. Hammurabi and his scribes were
not its authors. Their work was that of compilers. This oldest pre-
served code of ancient law was basically a compilation of Sumerian (and
perhaps Semitic) laws of previous ages. Many old strains are recog-
nizable in the code, some of them dating back thousands of years before
Hammurabi's compilation (2000 B.C.).

The laws are grouped systematically, and we find a differentiation
between laws dealing with things — such as those concerning real estate,
personal property, trade and business relations — and those dealing with
persons. Though the code is in many respects a harsh one and reflects
some primitive elements, there is in it a radical departure from clan and
tribal law. For example, blood feud and marriage by capture were no
longer recognized in the code. Punishment was withdrawn from the
hands of the injured party or his kin and placed in the control of the king
and the judges. The king's law supplanted clan law. As yet, however,
no regular notaries or public prosecutors existed. In general, it may be
said that the code did not admit the oath and the ordeal unless witnesses
and documentary evidence were lacking.

The "eye for an eye" principle was applied to injuries and torts, and
also to the mistakes of a laborer or of a professional man, such as a
physician. Death was a common punishment; offenders were also pun-
ished by burning, impaling, and the amputation of limbs. A distinction
was often made between premeditated, accidental, and unintentional in-
juries, and the penalties varied accordingly. There seems to have existed
a tolerably competent court system, and the procedure in the courts, it
appears, was not entirely different from that of today. The whole code
gives testimony to the intimate tie between religion and the law. The
laws were assumed to be of divine derivation; the temples were also the
law courts; and, although they were appointed by the king, the priests
were the judges.

Despite the claim that its purpose was to prevent the strong from
oppressing the weak, the code of Hammurabi was unmistakably partial
to the strong and the rich — to the "vested interests" of the day. How-
ever, it did offer to the poor and the weak some measure of protection —
an advance over the total lack of redress common in many other areas.

Roman Law. The greatest legal product of the ancient world was the
famous system of Roman Law.6 A Frenchman has said that "Rome's

5 Zane, op. cit., Chap. IV.

0 Joseph Declareuil, Rome the Law-giver, Knopf, 1926; and Zane, op.
Chap. IX.

LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM 359

mission was war and her vocation law." It was in the field of legal theory
and practice that Rome made some of its most enduring contributions to
the civilization of western Europe. Rome succeeded in creating both a
science and an art of law in the course of the thousand years of its legal
development. The body of Roman legal theory and practice has been the
basis for the regulations by which a considerable part of the human race
has governed itself. It was the basis of the law in all Romanic lands
throughout the Middle Ages. It influenced canon law — the law of the
Roman Catholic Church. It was of extreme importance towards the close
of the Middle Ages throughout western Europe. Its influence is seen in
the legal codes of modern European countries since the close of the
eighteenth century, and in English law, especially the law merchant.

Broadly speaking, there were no a priori principles upon which the whole
body of Roman law was erected. Roman law, having slowly developed
from practical needs and considerations, was distinctly not a product of
theoretical legalistic conceptions. Roman private law rescued the indi-
vidual from the associations of one kind or another in which he had been
obscured, and recognized him as a distinct entity. Secular law became
the form of social control par excellence in Rome, and the Roman jurists
insisted upon the subordination of all citizens and their activities to the
reign of law. The Roman lawyers later derived from imperialistic experi-
ences and international contacts the theory of the universality of funda-
mental legal principles, which they believed to be common to all rational
men.

A most important source of Roman law was primitive custom. Since
the earliest regulation of custom was intrusted to the priests, for many
generations law was not distinguished from religion. It was at first
entirely a matter of ritual. The religious law — jus divinum — was for
some centuries about the only law the Romans knew. The chief aim was
to keep the peace with their gods, and a violation of taboos was the chief
crime. The law was in the hands of the priests and this gave the priestly
class great power. The impact of the Etruscans seems to have been the
vital influence in breaking down this priestly monopoly, secularizing
Roman law, and opening the way for its evolution.

Religious custom, however, is only one of the sources from which the
body of Roman law grew. The jurists themselves recognized that stat-
utes, plebiscites, decisions of the Senate, decisions and edicts of magis-
trates, imperial decrees, and the interpretations of jurists entered into its
composition. The sources that gave Roman law its most original charac-
teristics, and explain at the same time its fertility and flexibility, were the
edicts of the magistrates and the interpretations of the lawyers. These
influences did not always operate at the same time, nor did they all persist
throughout the thousand years of Roman legal development. They made
themselves felt at different times and in varying degrees.

The Laws of the Twelve Tables were the first step in the development
of written law. The civil law — jus civile — which first appeared in the
Twelve Tables was suited to a relatively simple society not far ad-
vanced economically. It contained many primitive religious elements;

360 LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

nevertheless, it remained the written private law which regulated the life
of the Romans until the last quarter of the second century B.C. This
was made possible by the fact that the provisions of the Laws of the
Twelve Tables were not at all rigid, but were constantly being modified
and expanded by the interpretations of trained jurists who adapted them
to new conditions. Before a lawsuit was tried, both parties to the case
consulted students of the law, who rendered advice to the litigants which
was supposed to be wholly impartial in nature. Some of these men kept
records of the cases, and thus there developed a body of legal litera-
ture. Having received advice, the parties to the suit appeared before the
praetor. This magistrate did one of two things: he settled the case then
and there by handing down his final interpretation of the law involved,
or he passed the casaon with instructions to a trial judge (judex) , usually
a Senator, who then determined its outcome. In a broad way, it may be
said that the praetor ruled on matters of law and the judge on the facts
in the case.

As Rome expanded by conquest and became a cosmopolitan city,
necessity demanded the creation of a new magistracy. The office of
praetor peregrinus was instituted (242 B.C.) to take care of cases in
which a foreigner was a participant. The praetor peregrinus, unlike the
older praetor urbanus, was free from the restraints of the Laws of the
Twelve Tables, and he was able to introduce new principles in the settle-
ment of lawsuits. In time, it became customary for the praetor to issue
an edict when he assumed office. In this he enunciated the working rules
which were to guide him in settling disputes. These edicts were some-
times modified by the succeeding praetor and sometimes reissued without
change. They made up, in time, a considerable body of legal theory and
practice. The governors in the provinces reproduced the legal functions
and procedure of the praetor peregrinus in Rome.

In the new legal procedure that developed and was applied in cases
involving foreigners, the magistrates were not averse to adopting legal
practices of non-Roman origin, especially when the latter were better
suited to problems arising from more advanced economic conditions than
were the provisions of the Twelve Tables. In many ways, the legal
practice covering cases that involved foreigners was, thus, far in advance
of that which obtained in disputes between Roman citizens. Toward the
close of the second century B.C., the mode of procedure of the peregrin
praetors was transferred to the urban praetors — an existing remedy was
adopted to meet changing conditions — and many dogmas and methods of
the Twelve Tables were thus given their deathblow. As a result of this
praetorian legal theory and practice and of contacts with the many cul-
tures of the Empire, there developed what is known as the jus gentium —
the composite law of the nations in the Empire — which was distinguished
from the jus civile, the law of Rome and its citizens. In time, the more
advanced jus gentium was even accepted by citizens in their dealings
among themselves and became an integral part of the whole body of
Roman law. From it there developed the notion of the jus naturale, those

LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM 361

basic legal principles believed to be common to all mankind. In this
process of assimilating foreign laws to Roman usage, the contribution of
Greece was, as VinogradorT has suggested, very important.

A most important role in the development of Roman law was played by
the jurists with their close reasoning and their examination and interpre-
tation of legal problems. The most outstanding early jurist was Sextus
Aelius Paetus, who was consul in 197 B.C. The really great names in
Roman law, however, date from a later time. Papinian, Paulus, Gaius,
Ulpian, and Modestinus all lived under the Empire. The later jurists
incorporated into their legal thought the Stoic conception of a natural law
governing all mankind. The particular function of the jurists, as well as
the fundamental achievement of Rome in the field of law, is set forth in
the following sentences:

No people have drawn a clearer distinction than the Romans between the abso-
lute and the relative, or better understood that every legal solution belongs to
the sphere of contingency. Their endeavour was to make apparent in each par-
ticular case what appeared to them to be Law, and then, better still, what with
greater moral refinement they called Equity.7

Just as the transition from city-state to Empire is reflected in the
development of Roman law, so the appearance of an absolute Emperor
resulted in the tendency towards codification. Two compilations of
imperial legislation were undertaken at the close of the third century A.D.
Then, in 439 A.D., the first portion of the code of Theodosius II showed
the influence of Christianity. The most important and complete codifi-
cation of both ancient and imperial law was the product of extensive
labors initiated by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. This enterprise
resulted in: (1) the Code, in 529 (a revised edition appeared five years
later) , in which the earlier codes were recast and brought together; (2) the
Digest, in 533, consisting of cogent excerpts from the same year. The
name Novels is given to the laws of Justinian which were promulgated
after the Code was completed. The codification by Justinian, while it
put an end to the further development of Roman law, at the same time
served as one of the most important agencies in its preservation for
subsequent ages.

Roman law, as we have noted, was the basis for the canon law of the
Roman Catholic Church. At the height of the Middle Ages, Roman law
was revived and exploited by the secular monarchs in their struggle
against the Church. Roman law laid great stress upon the supremacy of
the royal and imperial authority over all contending groups and classes.
Hence, it buttressed the claim of the monarchs to dominion over the
Church when the two came into conflict. Roman lawyers flocked to the
courts and were patronized by the monarchs whom they served. Law
schools, of which the most famous was the one at Bologna, developed to
give adequate training in Roman and canon law. Even the Christian

7 Declareuil, op. cit., p. 25.

362 LAW AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

Church was rent by a great dispute (the Conciliar Movement) which
turned about the application of Roman law to the principles and problems
of ecclesiastical administration. Finally, Roman law became a powerful
bulwark of secular absolutism when the latter came into being along with
the rise of the national state in early modern times.

Early Medieval Law Among the Franks. Early medieval civilization
represented a reversion from classical civilization to more primitive types
of culture. This was reflected in law. The best example of early medi-
eval law is afforded by the laws of the Franks in the Age of Merovingians.8

A striking feature of Frankish law was the multiplicity of laws actually
in force. The Gallo-Romans retained the Roman law; the various con-
quered Germanic peoples kept the laws of their own groups; and the
Franks had both the Salic and the Ripuarian law. In a conflict between
a Frank and a person of some other group, the legal systems of both
received consideration. This respect of the Franks for the laws and
customs of those they had conquered resulted in a situation where no
system of law had precedence over any other, and where the party to a
case usually defended himself by the law of his birth. Thus law was
essentially personal in its application, and not territorial. Foreigners and
Jews had to purchase protection from the king.

The laws, as a rule, enumerated and described the offenses against
persons, the family, and the tribe; listed the punishments for such crimes;
provided for judicial procedure; and covered a great many other questions
nonpolitical in nature. The Franks, like the other German peoples,
regarded most crimes not as public but as personal offenses, and the
punishment was in the hands of the kin group. Even after kinship rela-
tions were abolished by law at the close of the sixth century, the blood
feud persisted for a time.

The sections of the Salic law dealing with wergeld reveal both the new
social relations that had come about since the time of Clovis and the
frequency of violence in Merovingian society. For all injuries there
existed a carefully worked-out scale of "prices."

If any one have wished to kill another person, and the blow have missed, he on
whom it was proved shall be sentenced to 2500 denars, which make 63 shill-
ings. ... If any person have wished to strike another with a poisoned arrow,
and the arrow have glanced aside, and it shall be proved on him: he shall be
sentenced to 2500 denars, which make 63 shillings. ... If any person strike
another on the head so that the brAin appears, and the three bones which lie
above the brain shall project, he shall be sentenced to 1200 denars, which make
30 shillings.

Evidently, it was cheaper actually to assault someone than to pre-
meditate murder. The distinction between Roman and Frank appears
in the table of wergeld. It cost a Roman 63 shillings to plunder a Frank:
"but if a Frank have plundered a Roman, he shall be sentenced to 35 shil-

8 See Munroe Smith, The Development of European Law, Columbia University
Press, 1928, pp. 115ff.

LAW IN ACTION 395

Formal propriety and technical exactness in legal jargon are frequently
viewed as far more important than the actual facts of guilt or innocence.
This is best illustrated by the tendency to throw out of court cases which
may clearly demonstrate guilt but which, at the same time, involve some
trivial error in statement or procedure. Mark 0. Prentiss once brought
together an interesting anthology of cases illustrating what has been
called "pinhead jurisprudence":

A defendant was convicted under an indictment charging the theft of $100,
"lawful money." The conviction was set aside because the indictment did not
say "lawful money of the United States." The court gave as the reason for
granting the defendant a new trial that the victim might have been carrying
around Mexican money.

A defendant was convicted of stealing a pistol under an indictment which
described the pistol as a "Smith & Weston" revolver. A new trial was granted
because the proof showed that the defendant stole a "Smith & Wesson" revolver.

In Chicago, a notorious criminal known as "Eddie the Immune" was convicted
of stealing $59. There was never the shadow of a doubt as to his guilt. The
verdict was set aside on appeal because the jury did not find [i.e. state] the
exact amount stolen.

In Georgia a defendant was convicted under an indictment which charged that
he stole a hog that had a slit out of its right ear and a clip out of the left. The
appellate court granted the defendant a new trial because, while it was proved
that the defendant stole the hog, the evidence disclosed that it was a hog with
a slit out of its left ear and a clip out of its right ear.

In another case where a defendant was convicted of a serious crime the con-
viction was set aside by the higher court because the word "the" was left out of
the concluding phrase of the indictment, "against the peace and dignity of the
State."

In another case a defendant was convicted of stealing a pair of boots. The
judgment of the trial court was set aside by the higher court, because it appeared
that while the defendant had stolen two boots, he had stolen two rights.

In yet another case a conviction for larceny was set aside because the indict-
ment averred that it occurred in a "storehouse" when it should have used the
word "storeroom."

In a Montana case a verdict of guilty of larceny was set aside on appeal because
the trial judge instructed the jury that it must find intent to steal instead of a
criminal intent.

Under another absurd ruling a conviction for stealing was set aside because
there was no proof that 800 pounds of cotton was a thing of value.

In yet another case involving some offense along a public road the conviction
was set aside because, while the proof showed that the road had been used for
thirty years as a public road, it did not show that the road had ever been
formally dedicated to the public.

There is an Alabama case which held that the omission of the letter "i" from
the word "malice" in an indictment for assault with intent to murder rendered
the indictment bad, and the conviction of a defendant under that indictment
was set aside.

In another Alabama case it was held that an indictment charging that murder
had been committed "with malice aforethou" did not allege "malice aforethought,"

396 LAW IN ACTION

and that the indictment was legally insufficient. The court noted in that case:
"Great precision should be observed in matters which vitally affect the life and
liberty of the citizen." In England the judge would simply have corrected the
indictment with his pen and gone on with the case.

In another Alabama case a defendant was charged in the indictment with
stealing a cow. The evidence proved him guilty of stealing a bull. In cither
event the defendant was guilty of grand larceny. The higher court, however,
set aside the judgment of conviction.

In another case the defendant was charged with stealing eleven cow hides. The
higher court said: "There was a total absence of evidence that the hides stolen
were cow hides. Non constat, they were horse hides, or hides of some other
animal than that of the cow kind." The sentence of the lower court in that
case was set aside, although the evidence showed that the defendant in that case
was guilty of grand larceny.6

Probably the most spectacular example of the distortion of justice by
adherence to pinhead technicalities was the granting of a mistrial by
Judge Ferdinand Pecora in the trial of the political boss, James J. Hines,
in New York City. After over a month of an expensive and elaborate
trial a mistrial was granted over what Mr. Jackson rightly describes as
"the merest technicality." The prosecutor, Mr. Dewey, had merely asked
a witness whether Hines had been mentioned before a former grand jury
as having some connections with the poultry racket. This action of
Judge Pecora aroused bitter newspaper criticism and is not likely to.be
repeated for some time.7

The same excessive regard for technical correctness controls the matter
of appeal. Gross injustice may be clearly evident from any thorough
study of the case. But, if the procedure is entirely correct from the
standpoint of legal etiquette, the defendant will be regarded as having
had an entirely fair trial, and the demand for a new trial will be uncere-
moniously denied. In some states, the judge who tried the case will
be permitted to decide upon the matter of appeal. This was the case
when the notoriously biased Judge Webster Thayer passed upon the
petitions for appeal from the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti. The
success of the magician among primitive peoples depended very largely
upon the exactness of his technique in following the prescribed magic
formulas. The contemporary judge and lawyer run him a close second.
No other profession, not even that of the Fundamentalist theologian, has
such regard for jargon, phraseology, and procedural niceties.8

To make matters worse, a considerable portion of the testimony actu-
ally admitted in cases is perjured. An exposition of the appalling preva-
lence of perjury in the courts of the United States was set forth by
Dorothy Dunbar Bromley in an article "Perjury Rampant." 9 The situ-
ation which she describes is almost incredible to the layman. John M. F.

6 The New York Times Current History Magazine, October, 1925. For more
material on technicalities in court procedure, see Jackson, op. cit., pp. 126 ff., 147 ff.

7 Cf. Jackson, op. cit., pp. 17 ff.
* Cf. Ibid., Chap. IV.

» Harper's, June, 1931.

LAW IN ACTION 397

Gibbons, one of the most eminent lawyers of our generation, states that
in over twenty years' experience in the courts of the United States he was
aware of only two cases in which perjury had not figured. And he stated
that "in reaching this shocking conclusion, I have been most careful to
distinguish between malignant false swearing and benign inaccuracy."
A Supreme Court Justice of the State of New York told Mrs. Bromley
that the courts of the State took perjury for granted, and said that "we
have reached the point where we are merely trying to find out which side
is lying the least." Perjured evidence is particularly common in connec-
tion with the so-called negligence cases. These are the accident and
similar cases which lawyers take on a contingent basis, namely, the agree-
ment that they will collect a fee only if they succeed in getting damages
awarded to the plaintiff. During Prohibition, one of our most distin-
guished attorneys, I. Maurice Wormser, remarked that "a negligence law-
suit without perjury is almost as rare today as a glass of good Pilsner." 10
One reason why perjury is so frequent, that, in the words of Samuel
Untermeyer, "it has become so general as to taint and well-nigh paralyze
the administration of justice," is that it is rarely prosecuted. As former
United States attorney, Charles H. Tuttle, observed, "the practice of per-
jury has come to be surrounded with a practical immunity." In 1923,
there were 109,000 persons confined in state and federal prisons, but only
171 were there for perjury. From the statements of distinguished
lawyers, it would seem reasonable that there must have been at least one
instance of perjured testimony for each person convicted and imprisoned.
Indeed, in the average important case there may be a dozen or more
examples of perjured testimony. In New York City, where it is very rare
for a case to be tried without perjured evidence, there were in the three
years, 1925, 1926, 1927, only 103 arrests for perjury and 15 convictions.
In Chicago, where perjury is presumably more common than in New
York, only three persons were sentenced for perjury in the five years 1926
to 1930, inclusive. An interesting perjury case on record is that of Edith
St. Glair. We shall let Mrs. Bromley tell the story:

The difficulty of getting a conviction for perjury on the basis of a witness's con-
tradictory sworn statements may be illustrated by the following story. Miss
Edith St. Clair, an actress, a number of years ago sued Mr. Abraham Erlanger,
the former theatrical producer, for having failed to fulfill the terms of a contract
under which he had agreed to pay her, "for services unspecified^" twenty-five
thousand dollars in ten yearly installments. She was able to convince the judge
and jury of the authenticity of her claim and accordingly won a judgment in the
Supreme Court of New York, which ordered Mr. Erlanger to make the yearly
payments. Subsequently, however, she appeared at the office of Mr. Erlanger's
attorney and for some unknown reason confessed that she had lied about the
contract, and that her attorney, Mr. Max D. Steuer, a New York lawyer whose
name is now much in the public print, had put her up to the story. Her state-
ment was reduced to an affidavit, and the judgment which she had obtained was
accordingly set aside. As a result of Miss St. Clair's revelations, disbarment

10 For a comprehensive survey of the prevalence of perjury among witnesses, see
Jackson, op. cit., Chap. XI.

398 LAW IN ACTION

proceedings were instituted against Mr. Steuer by the Appellate Division of the
New York Supreme Court at the instance of the New York City Bar Association.
But when she was called as a witness she once again recanted and said that she
had told the truth the first time and that Mr. Stcuer had not been responsible
for her claim against Mr. Erlanger. The charge against Mr. Steuer was accord-
ingly dismissed, and the State's next move was to try Miss St. Clair for perjury.
But the prosecution suffered from the disadvantage of not being able to prove
at which time she had sworn falsely, and so the jury failed to convict. Here was
a case where the courts were shamelessly exploited arid yet no one was punished.11

Mr. Jackson confirms in detail this picture of the prevalence of perjury:

Deep down in his heart the average witness believes that his job is to out-
trick tnc other side and that he is put on the witness stand not to tell the truth,
but to help win the case, lie undertakes to do so even if he has to lie in the
process. ...

Under our present system, perjury is viewed as an ineradicable evil — and it
probably is. Like Jupiter who laughs at lover's lies, we applaud the success of
legal liars. Perjury has come to be accepted as one of the counters inevitably
found in the legal game of the courtroom. Tt took over twenty years to free
Mooney, although the pur jury that convicted him was proven beyond doubt.

There is little protection against perjury. We are all too tolerant of it. We
not only view it as an ineradicable evil but we come to expect it. In criminal
and divorce cases, everybody expects lying. A man who is fighting for his life
or his liberty is not expected to sacrifice either one for an undue sense of honor
respecting a mere oath. A defendant in a divorce suit is never expected to confers
fault; a corespondent is considered a cad if he fails to lie like a gentleman in
defense of his paramour's honor. In such case, the lesser legal crime of perjury
yields to the greater demands of the so-called moral code.12

Not only witnesses but lawyers in court cases may lie shamelessly.
The clever lawyer will rarely take the stand and swear to his lie, and thus
render himself liable to prosecution for perjury. Rather, he will include
the false statements in his address to the jury and thus escape any legal
liability for his lying.13

Whereas perjury is usually overlooked in normal court practice, it is
eagerly seized upon to persecute representatives of unpopular causes.
The classic case was the conviction of Earl Browder of technical perjury
in the course of an application for a passport. Another notorious ex-
ample was the conviction of Morris Schappes, a former-Communist
instructor at the College of the City of New York, in the spring of 1941.
The prosecutor did not produce reasonable proof that Schappes com-
mitted perjury. It was sufficient for the case that he admitted former
membership in the Communist party. Perjury prosecution and con-
viction were also imposed on George Hill, secretary of the isolationist
Congressman, Hamilton Fish,*

The office of judge is truly a noble public position and eminently de-
serving of the respect of citizens. The term "judicious" has come to

11 Bromley, loc. tit., pp. 41-42. See also Harry Hibschman, "That Perjury Prob-
lem," American Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, January, February, 1934.

12 Jackson, op. cit., pp. 316, 323.

is For a good example of such lying by an attorney, see Ibid., p. 268.

LAW IN ACTION 399

connote the essence of wisdom, combined with fairness. We frequently
extol the "judicial mind" as a type of mentality which is not swayed
by favoritism, partisanship, or a desire for personal gain. It is the sort
of mentality which weighs the facts and conies to decision on the basis
of these facts without fear or favor. This idealized conception of the
judge and the judicial mind cannot be too highly regarded or accorded
too much respect. Unfortunately, the human material which occupies
judges' shoes all too frequently does not measure up to the stature of
ability, integrity, and wisdom which is associated in the popular mind
with the judicial role. Perhaps the two eminent judges of our generation
who have possessed to the full the imaginary — or legendary — "judicial
mind" have been Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo. It
may not be remiss to suggest that this is why they were regarded as such
unusual judges.

We have no special training for judges and no particular qualifications
designed to bring about a situation where the incumbents of the judicial
office will qualify for the responsibilities imposed upon them. The
majority of judges are practicing lawyers before they are elevated to the
bench, and, more often than not, are political lawyers who have played
fast and loose in the sordid game of politics. They usually owe their
nomination, election, or appointment to the bench to prominent politi-
cians. They have to pay their political debts. Moreover, judges are
human beings, with their personal likes and dislikes and their convictions
and prejudices in regard to political, economic, and social matters. They
are no more able to divest themselves of such attitudes than is a minister,
or a college professor. But their professional indulgence of prejudices,
and of likes and dislikes, carries with it more disastrous consequences than
is the case with any other profession. A minister may condemn a parish-
ioner to hell, but the execution of the penalty is not certain and, in any
event, is a long way off. A college professor may flunk an over-sceptical
student, but he cannot ruin him. Only the most irresponsible physician
would think of poisoning his patient. But a judge can handle a law case
in such a fashion as to jail an innocent person for many years or send him
to the death house. The case of Judge Webster Thayer and the judicial
assassination of Sacco and Vanzetti immediately come to mind in this
connection. Or, the judge may so 'conduct a trial as to let loose upon
society a vicious and guilty criminal if, for some reason or another, the
judge wishes this to be done. The life and liberty of almost any citizen
in the community may, at some time or another, hang upon the economic
prejudices, the personal eccentricities, or the current state of the digestive
tract of some judge. For this reason it is particularly unfortunate that
the theoretical qualifications of our judges are so rarely equaled by the
actual attainments of incumbents of this high and noble office.

It is difficult for some to understand how a judge can markedly affect
the conduct of the case. True, courtroom procedure is pretty rigorously
prescribed and, in many cases, the law which applies is fairly precise and
reasonably well known. Admittedly, the judge has no such leeway for

400 LAW IN ACTION

personal eccentricity and doctrinal interpretations as a college professor.
But he constantly has to interpret the law and its application, to rule on
innumerable objections in the courtroom, to maintain order, and to
control the behavior of the lawyers. While the judge may be overruled
in superior courts upon appeal, he is, for the time being, the absolute
monarch of the courtroom. No one save an army or an armed mob can
challenge his dominion. His rulings are frequently unrestrained by
specific legal or procedural enactments. He can readily favor one side
or another, though some care has to be exercised in this matter, lest he run
into the danger of a rebuke from the courts of review.

Lawyers frankly admit the difficulty of winning a case, even though
the evidence is wholly favorable to their side, if they have to deal with
a hostile judge. On such an occasion, their only chance is to get a re-
versal in the upper courts. This is sometimes rendered difficult because
the court record may give the impression of impartiality and legal pro-
priety. The judge's words may be formally correct, but the tone of his
voice, his inflections, and the like, may most effectively convey the im-
pressions he desires to register on the jury. Only a phonographic record-
ing of the judge's rulings and charges and a moving-picture film of the
courtroom during the trial would enable a reviewing court to form an
accurate impression of the actual conduct of a judge in any particular
case. Such recordings may be demanded in the future, but they have not
thus far figured in courtroom procedure, though some administrative
agencies in Washington, notably the Interstate Commerce Commission,
often do make such recordings.

The judge's charge to the jury is of extreme importance. Only an
exceptionally clever attorney can offset the effect upon a jury which is
made by the judge's charge. The judge gets the last opportunity to
address the jury, which naturally holds him in greater awe than it does
the average attorney. Only a Clarence Darrow may impress a jury more
than a judge. It is so rare as to be almost revolutionary for a jury
to ignore entirely the tone or import of a judge's charge. But the judge
may frequently ignore the more cogent evidence and attempt to influence
the1 jury by general considerations arising out of his particular prejudices.
The judge's offense in this regard must be particularly obvious in order
to be met with a reversal in an upper court on the ground of an improper
charge to the jury.

When a verdict is returned contrary to the wishes of the judge, it is
not unknown for the latter to telephone the attorney who has won the
case and ask him to let the judgment drop. This cannot, of course, be
done in any criminal case. But it can readily be done in the instance
of a judgment in a civil case. Two cases have come to the attention
of the writer within a brief period of time in which the same judge
requested lawyers to "forget" a judgment just rendered by the jury.
And it hardly need be added that the lawyers took the hint and urged
their clients to let the judgment drop. This the clients had to do because
they could find no other lawyer who would risk the wrath of the trial

LAW IN ACTION 401

judge by picking up the case. This form of tyranny is most usual in
smaller cities where only one or two judges preside throughout the court
terms of the year. Attorneys are dependent, literally, for their bread and
butter upon keeping on good terms with the judge before whom they have
to appear constantly.

We have referred above only to instances in which the judges have
exercised arbitrary authority in interpreting the law, stretching the law,
or conducting court procedure in such a fashion as to favor one party
in the legal contest before them. But it is not uncommon for judges to
ignore inconvenient laws, to usurp undue power, and to interpret laws in
such a fashion as to destroy the intent of the makers. In their important
book, Lawless Judges, Louis P. Goldberg and Eleanore Levenson have
summarized some of the more common deviations of judges from the
high ideal set for judicial procedure:

1. Judges, in the decision of cases, have deliberately applied their economic
principles and prejudices, rather than the existing laws.

2. Not only have judges failed to apply the constitutional provisions for
the protection of civil rights of individuals and minority groups but they have
construed such provisions so as to deprive large masses of workers and non-
conforming minorities of their constitutional privileges.

3. Judges have changed existing law by judicial decision, thereby usurping the
legislative function.

4. Judges have used their power to interpret laws so as to emasculate statutes
and prevent the intent of the legislatures from being applied.

5. Judges have declared unconstitutional, laws intended to protect the people
against econoniic exploitation.

6. The judiciary has to all intents and purposes established itself as dictator
over the American people.

From previous experience it is clearly inimical to the best interests of tho
people to permit judges to continue to exercise the powers they have in the past
assumed to possess.14

The chief reason why the abuse of judicial powers has persisted is that
no practical method exists whereby judges can be disciplined or controlled.
Nothing short of the commission of a gross crime can get a judge removed
from the bench. No one can effectively protest against judicial tyranny
and impropriety without rendering himself liable to prosecution on the
grounds of contempt of court. Judges enjoy an immunity for their
actions matched only by oriental potentates or major league baseball
umpires. But one can criticize the latter without suffering the serious
penalties which a judge can impose. As Alice Hamilton puts it: "One
may revile the President of the United States with impunity, one may
utter blasphemies against the Most High without even attracting atten-
tion, but if one is bold enough to protest against an abusive tirade by an
ill-bred or drunken judge one may have to expiate it in prison." 15

It is all but impossible to bring charges against a judge for incompe-
tence or arbitrary disregard of the law and elementary principles of

i* Rand School Press, 1935, pp. 231-232.
15 Harper's Magazine, October, 1931,

402 LAW IN ACTION

fairness. Only the lawyers who practice before the judge are likely to
be familiar with his deficiencies and offenses, and they take their pro-
fessional lives in their hands the moment they incur the displeasure of
the judge. It is literally impossible to get practicing lawyers to band
together and prefer charges against even the most notoriously incompetent
or arbitrary judge. The reasons for this have been well set forth by the
eminent jurist, Dean John H. Wigmore:

The public docs not fully understand the position of the judge in respect to his
immunity from exposure by I he bar. His iniquities or incompetence, if any, are
so committed as to become directly known only to a few persons in any given
instance? ; and these few persons are the attorneys in charge of the case. To bear
open testimony against him now is to risk professional ruin at his hands in the
near future. Moreover, this ruin can be perpetrated by him without fear of the
detection of his malice, because a judge s decision can be openly placed upon
plausible grounds, while secretly based on the resolve to disfavor the attorney in
the case. Hence lawyers dread, most of all things, to give personal offense to
a judge.16

In the light of the mode of selecting our judges, and of their almost
complete immunity from the consequences of any conduct short of the
grossest criminality attended by conspicuous publicity, the wonder is that
we do not suffer more than we do from judicial tyranny and oppression.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that the conduct of the typical
Fascist bureaucrat and Soviet commissar in Europe today is no more
arbitrary or thoroughly removed from democratic control than is the
behavior of the average American judge.

In the Municipal Courts of large cities is found, perhaps, the lowest
order of what is somewhat humorously termed the "administration of
justice" in this country. This situation is due in part to the overcrowding
of the courts. For example, in 1930, there were no less than 645,451
proceedings in the Municipal Court of New York City. Not even a
Charles Evans Hughes could administer justice in adequate fashion
amidst the congestion and confusion that prevail. When we find on the
bench of these courts third- and fourth-rate lawyers, without high ethical
standards, and often with the most sordid political affiliations, it is not
surprising that the state of affairs in the lower courts throughout
the country is a blot upon American civilization. It is merely a lucky
accident if a case is decided in a magistrate's court in harmony with fact
and justice. Mr. Gisnet thus describes the character of our magistrates'
courts:

The conduct of some of the magistrates who preside in the police courts of the
big cities the country over, and particularly in those of New York City, is dis-
graceful. Some of them have absolutely no regard whatever for the fundamental
rights of the average poor person who is brought before them sometimes on the
flimsiest charge. Others display woeful ignorance and vile tempers fit for bar-
rooms and sink so low as to threaten defendants with physical violence in the
name of real Americanism. While still others are so much in love with publicity
that they are on the alert for opportunities to create news-items that will get

16 Cited in Goldberg and Levenson, op. cit., pp. 230-231.

LAW IN ACTION 403

their names into the press, like imposing on a defendant the stupid penalty of
kissing his mother-in-law in open court as a condition of regaining his freedom,
and similar stunts.

The experienced observer can't help noticing very quickly that the game of
"fixing" and "wire pulling" is played in these courts by low ward politicians and
shyster lawyers. Persons with money and political influence escape the rigors
of the law while the poor and ihe friendless are made to suffer even if innocent.17

Another abuse associated with the magistrates' courts is the frequency
with which innocent persons are at least temporarily jailed because of
inability to furnish bail. The poor and friendless types wrho frequently
appear in magistrates' courts are particularly subject to this handicap
and humiliation. In the light of the generally low estate of justice in
magistrates' courts, one may pay a special tribute to the few magistrates
who exhibit a high-minded devotion to justice, and display commendable
industry and a degree of judicial enlightenment all too frequently absent
from the bench on the highest courts of the land. In what is literally the
judicial and legal cellar are the night courts. These courts frequently
maintain an intellectual and moral level not much above that of the
brothel, dive, saloon, and gambling joints which furnish the night courts
with most of their cases.

In the preceding pages, we have been dealing mainly with judicial
arbitrariness and incompetence. Much more serious is overt judicial cor-
ruption.18 Most judges, even those who are appointed, owe their position
to political leaders. Elective judges rarely receive the nomination unless
they are satisfactory to political leaders. In return they are expected to
make many appointments as political favors and even dispense "justice"
in such a manner as to serve the political organization. At times, judges
hear cases involving companies in which they are financially interested.
While most judges do not descend to such a level, there are all too many
who are linked with organized criminals and racketeers. A distinguished
criminologist has made the statement that it is rare to find any powerful
criminal ring without a corrupt judge at its center.

While honest judges and lawyers deplore judicial corruption, it is hard
to get them to act. Many fear that they arc not qualified "to cast the
first stone." It is significant that Federal Judge Martin T. Manton,
convicted of venality and sale of "justice," was not exposed by lawyers,
judges, or bar associations, but by a newspaper sleuth.19 The bar could
not have been ignorant of Manton's doings, for Nicholas Murray Butler,
in his autobiography, mentions that the leaders of the New York bar were
all but prostrated with amazement and alarm when President Harding
proposed to appoint Manton to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Yet, these same leaders of the bar did nothing for nearly twenty years,
and stood by while Manton became the ranking Federal judge, next to
the members of the Supreme Court. It may be noted that the sentence

17 Gisnet, op. dt., pp. 113-114.

18 For a good discussion of this subject, see Jackson, op. cit., Chap. X.

id., pp. 289 If.; and S. B. Heath, Yankee Reporter, Funk, 1940.

404 LAW IN ACTION

imposed on Judge Manton was only half as severe as that given to Earl
Browder for a technical violation of the law in applying for a passport.
The poor man is handicapped in a number of ways in getting equality
of treatment with the rich in the courtroom. It is more difficult for the
former to meet the ordinary costs of litigation, such as getting bail, ordi-
nary court fees, the hiring of a competent lawyer, and other inevitable
expenses of courtroom procedure/20 These difficulties have been sum-
marized by a capable and experienced lawyer, John MacArthur McGuire
of Massachusetts:

In more than one of the United States such a plaintiff fa poor person] may be
cast out of court and barred from testing the merits of his cause if he cannot
produce security or a bondsman. Nor is this by any means the whole story,
roverty, often through the application of some rule of law which otherwise seems
eminently reasonable, blocks a civil litigant's path at every stage of the; proceed-
ings. A penniless suitor may lose his day in court because he has no ready money
to pay the fees for his writ, for serving process, for entering suit and for other
similar official acts. lie may get into court but be helpless because he cannot
pay for a lawyer; or he may become helpless in the midst of a case because he
lacks funds to bring his witnesses, to pay a stenographer or to pay a printer.
He must, in short, surmount four financial barriers: costs, fees, expense of legal
service, and sundry miscellaneous expenses incidental to litigation.21

It is obvious that the poor are at a definite disadvantage in obtaining
lawyers to serve them. A wealthy client can almost invariably procure
the ablest attorneys and can get the latter to devote their best talents to
the handling of the case. The poor man has to get the best lawyer he can
afford and has to run the chance that the latter will give the case only
the superficial attention which the small fee is thought to justify. More-
over, the poor man stands at a disadvantage with respect to the judge.
Most judges arc naturally and inevitably sympathetic with the well-to-do,
and are much more likely to be prejudiced against, and impatient with,
the poor man.

As Chief Justice Taft once pointed out, a wealthy person can frequently
either win a case or get a favorable compromise simply by arranging for
indefinite postponements :

It may be asserted as a general proposition, to which many legislatures seem to
be oblivious, that everything which tends to prolong or delay litigation between
individuals or between individuals and corporations is a great advantage for that
litigant who has the longer purse. The man whose all is involved in the decision
of the lawsuit is much prejudiced in a fight through the courts, if his opponent
is able, by reason of his means to prolong the litigation and keep him for years
out of what really belongs to him. The wealthy defendant can almost always
secure a compromise of yielding of lawful rights because of the necessities of the
poor plaintiff.22

If the poor man is lucky enough to win his case in court, he then has
to face the prospect of appeal by a wealthy opponent. Appeals involve

20 For details, see Smith, Justice and the Poor, Chaps. V, VI.

21 Gisnet, op. cit.t pp. 95-96. For more details on this, see Jackson, op. cit., pp.
155 ff.

22 Gisnet, op. cit., pp. 94-95.

LAW IN ACTION 405

further delays and expenses. Often, the poor man's funds have been
exhausted in the original trial and he has no reserve for financing the case
during the appeal period. It is, thus, obvious that a poor man faces
special handicaps if a wealthy opponent appeals a defeat in the trial
court. He is likely to have to remain content with licking his wounds.23
A thoroughgoing study of the handicaps of the poor litigant in an
American court was made a number of years ago under the auspices of the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by Reginald
Heber Smith of the Boston bar. His comprehensive and highly capable
report, entitled Justice and the Poor, presented a staggering picture of the
difficulties a poor man faces in getting justice in the United States. But
it was approved as a substantially accurate picture of the true situation
by no less eminent lawyers than Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes.
Mr, Smith thus expresses some of his major conclusions:

The administration of American justice is not impartial, the rich and the poor
do not stand on an equality before the law, the traditional method of providing
justice has operated to close the doors of the courts to the poor, and has caused
a gross denial of justice in all parts of the country to millions of persons. Sweep-
ing as this indictment may appear, it is substantiated by ample authority. . . .

Because law is all-embracing, the denial of its protection means the destruction
of homes through illegal foreclosures, the loss through trick or chicanery of a
lifetime's savings, the taking away of children from their parents by fraudulent
guardianship proceedings. Hundreds of thousands of men, many of them immi*
grants, have been unable to collect their wages honestly earned.

Denial of justice is not merely negative in effect; it actively encourages fraud
and dishonesty. Unscrupulous employers, seeing the inability of wage-earners to
enforce payments, have deliberately hired men without the slightest intention of
paying them. Some of these employers are themselves poor men, who strive in
this way to gain an advantage. The evil is not one of class in the sense that it
gives the poor over to the mercies of only the rich. It enables the poor to rob
one another; it permits the shrewd immigrant of a few years' residence to defraud
his more recently arrived countrymen. The line of cleavage which it follows and
accentuates is that between the dishonest and the honest. Everywhere it abets
the unscrupulous, the crafty, and the vicious in their ceaseless plans for exploiting
their less intelligent and less fortunate fellows. The system not only robs the
poor of their only protection, but it places in the hands of their oppressors the
most powerful and ruthless weapon ever invented. . , .

The effects of this denial of justice are far reaching. Nothing rankles more in
the human heart than the feeling of injustice. It produces a sense of helplessness,
then bitterness. It is brooded over. It leads directly to contempt for law, dis-
loyalty to the government, and plants the seeds of anarchy. The conviction
grows that law is not justice and challenges the belief that justice is best secured
when administered according to law. The poor come to think of American justice
as containing only laws that punish and never laws that help. They are against
the law because they consider the law against them. A persuasion spreads that
there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.24

The material presented in this section constitutes only a few of the
outstanding illustrations of the deficiencies in American law, as it is

23 C/. Jackson, op. cit., pp. 237 ff.

24 Smith, op. cit., pp. 8-10.

406 LAW IN ACTION

actually practiced before our courts, but it is sufficient to illustrate the
variety and seriousness of the defects of American law in operation. We
shall also touch upon these problems incidentally in later sections of the
chapter.

Natural 'Law, Constitutional Law, and the Protection

of Property

The New Testament set up a famous triad of virtues — faith, hope, and
charity — arid Paul explicitly stated that the greatest of these is charity.
The theory of natural law, lying back of our Declaration of Independence
and Federal Constitution, created an equally historic triad in the form of
the natural rights of man — life, liberty, and property — and the subsequent
interpretation of these rights in our courts has elevated property to as
preeminent a place as charity occupied in the Pauline scale of values.

in a notable book, The Revival of Natural Law Concepts, Charles
Grove Haines has made it clear that the conservative jurisprudence of the
United States Supreme Court, especially in the twentieth century, has
been based primarily upon the concepts of seventeenth-century natural
law.25 There is the same tendency to seek a foundation for law in
sources "external to man and his law-making and law-enforcing agencies."
When the rule of reason was introduced in 1911, in dealing with anti-trust
cases, we had a literal revival of the very essence of natural law theory in
interpreting and applying the laws of the United States to business* The
Supreme Court has thus been able to hold over American lawmakers the
extremely vague but highly potent club of the rule of reason. As Pro-
fessor Haines says, "the United States is practically alone in placing
super-censors over its legislative chambers with often nothing more than
the elusive rule of reason as a standard." In fact, the older and broader
concept of "due process of law" is little more than another name for
natural law and the dominion of reason.

Professor Haines well observes that our judges have found a "haven
in due process of law, which is little else than a natural law given consti-
tutional sanction — with the same vagueness and uncertainty inherent in
the standard phrases." Using these antiquated but extremely convenient
legal notions, the Supreme Court has wrought havoc with progressive
legislation in the United States and has been very effective in protecting
private property and corporate rights against effective social control.

Perhaps as good a statement as was ever made of the philosophy of
property rights accepted by the Supreme Court was that set forth by the
corporation lawyer Joseph H. Choate when he argued in 1895 against the
constitutionality of the income-tax law, in the famous Pollock case:

I believe that there are rights of property here to be protected; that we have
a right to come to this Court and ask for this protection, and that this Court has
a right, without asking leave of the Attorney General or of any counsel, to hear
our plea. The Act of Congress [the income tax law] we are impugning before

25 See above, p. 369.

LAW IN ACTION 407

you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon
principles as communistic, socialist— what shall I call them? — populistic as ever
have been addressed to any political assembly in the world. ... I have
thought that one of the fundamental objects of all civilized government was the
preservation of the rights of private property. I have thought that it was the
very keystone of the arch upon which all civilized government rests. ... If it
be true . . . that the passions of the people are aroused 011 this subject, if it be
true that a mighty army of 60,000,000 citizens is likely to be incensed by this
decision, it is the more vital to the future welfare of this country that this Court
again resolutely and courageously declare, as Marshall did, that it has the power
to set aside an Act of Congress violative of the Constitution, and that it will not
hesitate in executing that power, no matter what the threatened consequences of
popular or populistic wrath may be.20

One scarcely needs to be reminded that the Court accepted Mr. Choate's
reasoning and set the law aside as unconstitutional. It required a consti-
tutional amendment, many years later, to put the income-tax legislation
beyond the reach of the Supreme Court. Whatever attitude the Court
may take on property in the future, certainly it is fair and accurate to
say that the majority of its members subscribed to Mr. Choate's philos-
ophy from the close of the Civil War to the court reform proposals of
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937.

Far more illuminating than any broad generalizations or blanket
attacks on the Court is a calm factual statement of: (1) how it has stood,
for the most part, like a stone wall in the path of progressive legislation ;
(2) the processes it makes use of; and (3) the decisions through which it
has frustrated liberal and humane legislation.

The foundation of the activities of the Court in obstructing progress is
its assertion of the right to set aside federal and state legislation as
unconstitutional. This right, of dubious legal validity, it first claimed in
1803, in the case of Marbury vs. Madison, and in 1810, in the case of
Fletcher vs. Peck.27 For a hundred and thirty years it has used this
power, with ever-increasing frequency since 1886. This means that,
whenever the Court believes that a law does not square with the Consti-
tution, as interpreted at the time by five out of the nine judges on the
bench, the law is declared invalid and of no account. Until 1886, how-
ever, the Court was relatively cautious and restrained in declaring laws
unconstitutional. It had to be shown that the law in question clearly
violated some explicit provision of the Constitution. There were only
two major cases of setting aside a federal statute before the Civil War.
Shortly after the Civil War, a judicial perversion of one of the Reconstruc-
tion amendments gave the Court much greater leeway.

In order to protect the Negro against a return to servility, the Four-
teenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution. It directed that
no state should deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without

26 Cited in Maurice Finkelstein, The Dilemma of the Supreme Court: Is the
N.RA. Constitutional? Day, 1933, p. 24.

27 In Marbury vs. Madison, the Court set aside federal legislation ; in Fletcher vs.
Peck, it voided a state statute.

408 LAW IN ACTION

due process of law. A drive was made at once to get corporations ad-
mitted as "persons," under the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Success came in 1886, in the Santa Clara County case in California, when
the Court unanimously decided to include corporations in its interpre-
tation of the Fourteenth Amendment and "due process of law." This
let down the bars. As "due process of law" is, quite literally, anything
the Supreme Court decides it to be at any moment, there is no limit
whatever to its power to invalidate legislation. Whatever runs counter
to the economic, social, or political philosophy of five judges can be set
aside quite casually, no matter what the popular demand for the measure
or what its logical or traditional legality may be. The eminent jurist,
John Bassett Moore, once cryptically remarked that, while the Fourteenth
Amendment has given little protection to the Negro, it has been extremely
effective in aiding and sheltering "the corporation nigger-in-the-wood-
pile." E. S. Corwin has observed that " 'due process of law' is not
a regular concept at all, but merely a roving commission of judges to sink
whatever legislative craft may appear to them, from the standpoint of
the vested interests, to be of piratical tendency." 27a The distortion of
both the Fourteenth Amendment and "due process" by the Supreme Court
since 1886 is well summarized by Professor Rodell:

The "due process" clause was originally intended to apply only to criminal
cases. The idea that any statute, much less a non-criminal one like a tax or a
regulation of business, after being properly passed by a legislature, signed by a
governor, and enforced according to its terms by judges, could amount to a
deprivation of anything without due process of law would once have been laughed
out of court. Yet the Supreme Court has built the bulk of its Constitutional
Law, as applied to the states, on precisely that strange supposition. It has taken
a simple phrase of the Constitution which originally had a plain and precise
meaning, twisted that phrase out of all recognition, ringed it around with vague
general principles found nowhere in the Constitution, and then pontifically
mouthed that phrase and those principles as excuses for throwing out, or majes-
tically upholding, state laws.28

The fact that the Fourteenth Amendment and "due process of law"
were, used mainly to protect property from unfavorable legislation gave
the courts remarkable leeway and freedom in killing off legislation. Pro-
fessor Corwin has shown that "due process" means anything the courts
wish it to mean. We have already seen that, in recent years, the property
concept was widened by the courts to include anything the vested inter-
ests desired to protect. Therefore, when a constitutional or corporation
lawyer appealed to the courts to protect property by the use of "due proc-
ess," there was almost no limit to the extent to which the courts could go,
if they wished.

After corporations were admitted to the category of "persons" under
the "due process" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme

2<m Cited by Max Farrand, The Development of the United States, Houghton
Mifflin, 1918, p. 272.

LAW IN ACTION 409

Court became more reckless in setting aside legislation on the ground that
it was contrary to the Constitution. Far more laws were set aside be-
tween 1886 and 1900 than in the previous history of the Court, and more
than twice as many have been invalidated by the Court in the twentieth
century as in the whole period from Marshall to the opening of the present
century. So ruthless and arrogant was the attitude of the Court in this
matter that, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt openly proposed the recall of
judicial decisions. But the Court became even more active and light-
hearted in setting aside legislation after 1912. Others have proposed a
congressional veto upon the action of the Court in setting aside federal
laws.

With the exception of an occasional liberal, such as Harlan, Holmes,
Brandeis, Stone, and Cardozo, the Supreme Court justices down to 1938
were almost invariably reactionary lawyers, long in the service of great
corporate interests. Their experience, contacts, and outlook were those
of businessmen and financiers. Their philosophy inevitably colored their
view of law.29 The vague and broad character of the "due process of law"
test of constitutionality gave them, as we have seen, almost unrestricted
power to quash any law that conflicted with their conservative philosophy
and their reverence for property rights.

The Supreme Court became a particularly aggressive champion of
capitalism about the time we reached the stage of monopoly capitalism.
The liberals, fearing the power of great mergers and monopolies to control
prices at will, endeavored to check this process by the Sherman Anti-
Trust Act of 1890. In the E. C. Knight Case (1895) , the Supreme Court
declared, essentially, that the Sherman Act applied only to monopolies in
restraint of commerce between states and not to monopoly in manufactur-
ing. In 1897-98, the Court admitted that the act covered both reasonable
and unreasonable restraint of trade. But, in 1911, the Court, guided by
the reasoning of Justices White and Hughes, reinterpreted the Sherman
Act according to the famous "rule of reason," derived from natural law.
It held that the Sherman Act was violated only by "unreasonable" re-
straint of trade. As a result some of the greatest mergers, such as the
United States Steel Corporation, got through dissolution suits safely.
The Clayton Act, in Wilson's administration, endeavored still further to
control monopolies, but in the case of the Federal Trade Commission vs.
Gratz (1920) the Court emasculated this as it had earlier undermined
the Sherman Act. Some might allege that the "trust-busting" reformers
were mistaken in their policies, but at least they had the support of the
public, and the Court thus frustrated the popular will.

The railroads were, in their early days, the scene of much dubious
financial practice. Some semblance of public control was essential, and
the Interstate Commerce Commission was established in 1887 to supply
this supervision. The Supreme Court was soon found operating deci-

29 C/. Zechariah Chafee, Jr., "The Economic Determination of Judges," The
Inquiring Mind, Harcourt, Brace, 1928, pp. 254-265; and Gustavus Myers, A History
of the Supreme Court, Kerr, 1912.

410 LAW IN ACTION

sively on the side of the railroads. Out of sixteen appeals made from the
rulings of the Interstate Commerce Commission between 1887 and 1905,
the Court decided in favor of the railroads fifteen times. In 1897, the
Court further undermined the power of the commission by denying it
authority to fix rates. About all that was left was the right to collect
railroad statistics and give them publicity. Under Theodore Roosevelt's
influence, the commission was strengthened, and, in 1913, it was author-
ized to make a physical valuation of railroad properties as the basis for
scientific determination of rates. Further power was bestowed in 1920,
and liberals began to anticipate the day when the Interstate Commerce
Commission would have both the authority to fix railroad rates and the
knowledge requisite to do this in accurate and just fashion. This hope
the Court upset in the O'Fallon Case (1929) and in United Railways vs.
West (1930). The Court held that not "prudent investment" but "repro-
duction cost new" must be taken into account in determining rates. It
also held that anything less than 7.44 per cent return per year would be
confiscatory. The Court further permitted the deduction of a depreci-
ation charge from net income. Much the same principles favorable to
corporate wealth were extended from the railroads to the electric utilities
by the Court.

The Supreme Court has actually frustrated efforts to enforce elemen-
tary honesty in business, affecting such basic matters as both quantity and
quality of marketed materials. It thus tacitly encouraged the most anti-
social practices of marketing according to the theory of business enter-
prise, which we described earlier in the book. For example, in the case
of the Burns Baking Company vs. Bryan (1924), the Court declared
unconstitutional a standard-weights law designed to protect buyers from
short weight in sales. During the next year, in the case of Weaver vs.
Palmer Bros., the Court set aside a Pennsylvania law enacted to prevent
the use of shoddy in making comfortables.

Even more fundamental and sweeping was the Court's clearly implied
declaration, in the case of Allgeyer vs. Louisiana (1897), that business
practices and callings are above the law and that the Fourteenth Amend-
ment guarantees a man the right to live, work, and follow business
activities as he wishes, irrespective of statutory law.

One of the most elemental principles of economic and social democracy
is that, when money has to be raised for public purposes, taxation shall be
based upon the principle of capacity to pay. The more a man is allowed
to prosper in any society, the more may be reasonably exacted from him
to support the existing political and social order. The wealthy have
never been willing to concede this truism and have thus far prevented
taxation measures from even approximating a real "capacity-to-pay"
basis. The Supreme Court has not failed them in this struggle to evade
equitable taxation.

First came the notable decision in the case of Pollock vs. Farmers' Loan
and Trust Company (1895), in which the Court declared an income-tax
law unconstitutional. As has been noted, it took a constitutional amend-

LAW IN ACTION 411

ment to enable our government to collect a tax on personal incomes.
The Supreme Court then came to the rescue in the case of Eisner vs.
Macomber (1920) and declared that stock dividends were not income
and hence not liable to taxation. This provided a spacious loophole for
the rich. The Court steadfastly and consistently blocked any program of
fair and adequate taxation of corporations and holding companies.

If there is any practice of capitalism that is open to criticism, it is the
transmission of vast wealth from one generation to the next. An able and
energetic man may accumulate a fortune, in some cases to the benefit of
the public as well as himself. But under our present system he may
transmit his riches to a parasitical descendant who may never make even
a gesture of industriousness. The only way to correct this abuse is
through drastic inheritance and estate taxes. Some states have tried to
introduce such taxation. Wisconsin was a pioneer. The Supreme Court
stepped into the breach, and in the case of Schlesinger vs. Wisconsin
(1925), declared unconstitutional the Wisconsin law designed to end
evasions of the inheritance tax through spurious "gifts." In 1931, the
Court continued its obstructive policies in regard to taxes on inheritances
in two cases, Farmers' Loan and Trust Company vs. Minnesota, and
Coolidge vs. Long.

If capitalism is to endure, it must make provision for safe and decent
working-conditions, for an income sufficient to make each self-supporting
adult an effective purchaser, and for sufficient leisure to produce a broad
need for consumers' goods. Progressives have sought to bring such condi-
tions into being. An Employers' Liability Act was passed in 1906, but
the Court set it aside in Howard vs. Illinois C. R. Co. (1907). An
amended act was upheld in Second Employers' Liabilities Cases (1912)
and in New York Central R.R. Co. vs. White (1917). The State of New
York tried to eliminate atrocious working conditions in bakeshops by
limiting the hours of work. The Court invalidated this legislation in the
famous case of Lochner vs. New York (1905), reversed in Bunting vs.
Oregon (1917).

At first, the Court, influenced by the masterly presentation of the case
by Louis D. Brandeis, approved the Oregon minimum-wage law in Muller
vs. Oregon (1908). But, in 1923, in the case of Adkins vs. Children's
Hospital, it set aside a District of Columbia minimum-wage law of 1918
as unconstitutional because it infringed perfect "freedom of contract."
That the temper of the Court in this matter did not change for years was
proved in the case of Morehead vs. Tipaldo (1936), in which a con-
servative majority of five set aside as unconstitutional the New York
State minimum-wage legislation. Child labor was outlawed in Britain
a century ago, but the Supreme Court tolerated the practice, lest interfer-
ence destroy the sacred right of free contract. In the case of Hammer vs.
Dagenhart (1918) it declared the federal anti-child-labor law of 1916
unconstitutional. Congress tried again, in a law of 1919 taxing the
employers of child labor. The court set aside this law in 1922, in the case
of Bailey vs. Drexel Furniture Co.

412 LAW IN ACTION

If labor is to be kept satisfied with the capitalistic system, it must be
accorded equality with capital, yet in the famous Danbury hatters case,
Loewe vs. Lawlor (1908), labor was declared punishable for secondary
boycott, under the Sherman Act. In 1911, the Court went still further
(Gompers vs. Buck's Stove and Range Co.) and declared that officials of
the American Federation of Labor could be punished for encouraging
boycotts against non-union employers. The labor clauses of the Clayton
Act were specifically designed: (1) To prevent the prosecution of labor
under the Sherman Act, which was aimed at business trusts and monop-
olies; and (2) to reduce the use of the injunction against unions. But, in
the case of the Duplex Printing Company vs. Deering (1921), the Court
asserted that the Clayton Act did not prevent the issuing of injunctions
against organized labor. In the same year, in the case of Truax vs.
CorrigaUy the Court threw out an Arizona law forbidding the use of
injunctions against labor.

In the notorious case of Adair vs. United States (1908) , the Court held
that neither a, federal statute nor a state law could prevent an employer
from discharging one of his workers for joining a union. In the famous
case of Coppage vs. Kansas (1915), the Court set aside a Kansas law
which made it a misdemeanor to discharge a man simply because of his
union membership. Justice Pitney, for the majority, ruled that a worker
"has no inherent right to remain in the employ of one who is unwilling to
employ a union man." The case of Hitchman Coal and Coke Company
vs. Mitchell (1917) was a particularly deadly blow to organized labor.
It upheld the notorious "yellow-dog" contracts and reaffirmed the appli-
cability of the Sherman Act to labor union activities. In the Coronado
Case (1922) , the Court went still further and declared that a union might
be sued for damages under the antitrust laws, even though it was not
incorporated. In the Bedford Cut Stone Case (1927), the Court went the
limit and upheld the use of the injunction against union labor, even if it
could be proved that the strikers had in no way acted in an illegal manner.
In short, Supreme Court decisions no less than paralyzed organized labor
and collective bargaining, while, at the same time, sabotaging the efforts
of tbc government to subject business and finance to social control.

We have now indicated a few of the ways in which the Supreme Court
has frustrated or retarded the efforts of liberal leaders to establish a just
and civilized social and economic order in our country. It opposed
equitable taxation, permitted business to engage in even dishonest prac-
tices, interfered with efforts to provide decent wages and living conditions,
and all but ended the initiative of organized labor. In this way it has led
many of the more hot-headed to feel that the only way out is through
violence. While promoting revolution through its opposition to social
change, the Supreme Court has, however, naturally tried to outlaw
revolutionary movements in the United States. In the Gitlow Case
(1925), it outlawed revolutionary tactics and approved the prosecution of
the Communists and Syndicalists. Three years later it took the same
position in the Whitney Case, upholding the California Criminal Syndi-
calism law.

LAW IN ACTION 413

In our age, after witnessing the wastes, sorrows, and imbecilities of a
war and a postwar period, most thoughtful people have come to agree
upon the futility of war. More, they look upon war as a menace to the
race. But the Supreme Court still holds the obligation to bear arms
an essential to citizenship. Even a middle-aged and invalid woman of
high culture will not be admitted to citizenship unless she agrees to bear
arms in case of war. In the Schwimmer Case (1928) , the Supreme Court,
as Justice Holmes clearly implied, took a position of disapproval of the
Sermon on the Mount. The same attitude was continued in the Mac-
intosh and Bland Cases three years later. These cases involved applica-
tions for citizenship by Rosika Schwimmer, a cultivated Hungarian, by
Professor Douglas C. Macintosh of the Yale Divinity School, a former
army chaplain decorated for bravery under fire, and by Miss Marie
Bland, a former war nurse. They would not agree to bear arms under
any and all conditions.

The attitude of the Supreme Court with respect to New Deal legisla-
tion can be followed through a series of decisions which sorely disap-
pointed many liberal-minded persons who hoped for a more generous and
liberal judgment of measures that, at least, were rational efforts to cope
with profound social and economic maladjustments. The first important
New Deal cases to come before the Court were the Gold Cases, which were
decided on February 18, 1935. The Court found for the government
in these cases by a narrow majority and thus raised false hopes in the
minds of many liberals. From this decision onward, all the major New
Deal measures were set aside. The National Industrial Recovery Act
was voided in tho case of the Schechter Poultry Corporation vs. U.S.
(May 27, 1935). The Court was unanimous in this decision. The
attempt to control production in agriculture under the Agricultural Adjust-
ment Act was frustrated when the Court declared the AAA unconstitu-
tional in the case of U.S. vs. Butler (January 6, 1936). An effort to~
bring order into the chaotic bituminous coal industry was destroyed when
the Court invalidated the Guffey Coal Act, in the case of Carter vs. Carter
Coal Co. (May 18, 1936). The opposition of the Court to humane legis-
lation, when the latter conflicts with even an extreme view of the invio-
lability of property rights, was illustrated by the voiding of the Railway
Retirement Act granting pensions to railway employees in Railway
Retirement Board vs. Alton Ry. Co. (1935). The Frazier-Lemke Farm
Bankruptcy Act was passed in 1934 to save the most desperate class of
farmers from unnecessarily hasty foreclosure and eviction. But the
Court set it aside in 1935. The Court came to the rescue of property
interests, when threatened at all by public agencies, by declaring the
Municipal Bankruptcy Act unconstitutional on May 25, 1936. It also
invalidated the New York State Minimum Wage Act in the above-men-
tioned case of Morehead vs. Tipaldo (1936).

The defiance of democratic principles and of the mandate of the people
by the Supreme Court in voiding most of the important New Deal
measures produced great indignation on the part of American liberals,

414 LAW IN ACTION

including President Roosevelt himself. He accused the Court of wishing
to take the country buck to "horse and buggy days." It was expected
that he would propose some plan for curbing the power of the Court.
This he did, on February 5, 1937, when he gave out to the press his plan
for the reform of the federal judiciary. He suggested facilitating and
endowing the retirement of Supreme Court justices at the age of 70, giving
the President the right to appoint new members of the Court, up to a
total of fifteen, one for each judge who failed to resign at 70, and taking
steps to speed up the work in the federal courts as a whole.

The plan was an extremely clever one, though perhaps announced with
rather more than appropriate levity. There were a number of liberals
who would have preferred to have a constitutional amendment, limiting
the power of the Court to declare laws unconstitutional, but the President
evidently recognized that any such amendment would require years for
ratification, if, indeed, it would ever be ratified. The President's great
mistake was his failure to carry on an adequate program of public edu-
'cation on the Court issue in the early spring of 1937. Rather, he relied
upon Senate leader Joseph T. Robinson to get the bill through Congress,
having apparently promised Senator Robinson the first appointment to
the enlarged Court. But Robinson died in July, 1937, and the Court
fight flared up with great vigor. Reactionaries, and liberals jealous of
the President, poured out all their jealousy and venom upon the bill.
It was perfectly suited for their purposes. They could use an ostensible
effort to save the Constitution as a cloak for highly partisan sentiments
and motives. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, the leader of the
renegade liberals, went so far as to suggest that God struck down Senator
Robinson because of his sponsorship of the Court bill. The bill was
defeated, but resignations helped the President to remake the Court. In
May, 1937, Judge Willis Van Devanter resigned. The President ap-
pointed in his place, Senator Hugo L. Black of Alabama, a vigorous and
stalwart liberal. The President's enemies renewed their attacks because
of the fact that Black had once been a somewhat indifferent member of
the Ku Klux Klan but had long since resigned. In January, 1938, Justice
George Sutherland resigned and President Roosevelt appointed to the
vacancy Solicitor-General Stanley Reed. One resolute and one moderate
liberal thus replaced two of the arch reactionaries formerly on the Court.
In the next three years the personnel of the Court changed. Justice
Benjamin N. Cardozo died in 1938; Justice Pierce B,utler died in 1939;
Justice Louis D. Brandeis resigned in 1939; and Justice James C. Mc-
Reynolds resigned in 1941. To their posts President Roosevelt appointed
Felix Frankfurter and William 0. Douglas in 1939, Frank Murphy and
Robert Jackson in 1940, and James F. Byrnes in 1941. Mr. Roosevelt
had thus appointed no less than seven liberal members of the Court by
the end of 1941.

Even before this great shake-up, however, the Court showed a new
temper. Chief Justice Hughes was a clever politician with a generation
of political experience behind him. He realized that, if the Court con-

LAW IN ACTION 415

tinued to hand down reactionary decisions and invalidated further im-
portant New Deal legislation, the President's case for his Court bill
would be greatly strengthened. He appears to have converted to his
point of view Mr. Justice Roberts, who, according to the suggestion of
Thomas Reed Powell, may have realized that "a switch in time saves
nine." At least, Justice Roberts left the reactionaries and gave the
Court a liberal majority of five to four. As a succinct summary of the
President's Court fight, lawyers are fond of quoting from Smollett:
"Whereupon he leapt upon her and would have raped her, had she not
prevented him by her timely acquiescence."

The Court made the most startling right-about-face in its entire
history. On March 29, 1937, it reversed the stand that it had taken
the previous year on the New York State Minimum Wage Law, and
declared constitutional the legislation of the State of Washington pro-
viding minimum wages for women. On April 12, 1937, it upheld in four
cases the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, the most comprehensive
piece of labor legislation ever enacted in this country. In the spring of
1937, the Court also upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security
Act, in the cases of Helvering vs. Davis and The Steward Machine Co. vs.
Davis. In the case of Senn vs. Tile Layers' Protective Union, the Court
upheld a Wisconsin statute that legalized peaceful picketing. Civil
liberties were upheld in the case of DeJonge vs. Oregon, in which the
Court voided the Oregon Criminal Syndicalism Act, and in the case of
Herndon vs. Lowry, in which the Court held that Herndon, a Negro Com-
munist, had been deprived of freedom of speech and denied "due process
of law."

Most striking of all were the dissenting decisions of Mr. Justice Black,
who showed himself a more upstanding liberal than any other person
who has been on the Court within memory. Especially striking was his
dissent in the case of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company
vs. Johnson. He had the courage to assert that the Court had acted
improperly since 1886 in including corporations as persons under the
Fourteenth Amendment. This was the first time since 1873 80 that a
justice of the Supreme Court had possessed such candor and fortitude.
As Max Lerner expresses it, "he swept away fifty years of Supreme
Court history and struck at one of the props of corporate power." But
it is doubtful if the Justice will be able to convert even his liberal col-
leagues to such an advanced, but rational, view.81

In the session of 1937-38, the Court further upheld the National Labor
Relations Board and thus sustained the operation of the Wagner Act.
Especially important was the case of Myers vs. Bethlehem Shipbuilding

30 The date of the Slaughterhouse Cases when the court refused to extend the
Fourteenth Amendment to corporations.

31 Alarmed at Justice Black's audacity, other judges and lawyers accused him of
being woefully ignorant of the law. But, as Professor Rodell correctly says of
Justice Black: "He knows The Law too well— for what it really is." op. cit., p. 196.
For an authoritative estimate of Justice Black, see Walton H. Hamilton, "Mr. Justice
Black's First Year," in New Republic, June 8, 1938.

416 LAW IN ACTION

Corporation, in which the Court forbade the granting of injunctions
against the Board until the employer had exhausted all administrative
remedies provided by law. Civil liberties were further protected in the
case of Nardone vs. United States, in which the Court denied federal law
enforcement agents the right to get evidence by wire-tapping. The Na-
tional Labor Relations Board was again upheld in the session of 1938-39.
Whereas the Court set aside the original Agricultural Adjustment Act in
1936, it sustained the new AAA, passed in 1938, as well as upholding the
Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. The most important
civil liberties case of the session was that of Hague vs. CJ.O., in which
the Court rebuked Mayor Hague of Jersey City for his various abridge-
ments of civil liberties and "due process of law." From 1937, the Court
moved steadily ahead in limiting the immunity of official salaries from
intergovernmental taxation. In the case of O'Malley vs. Woodrough in
1939, the Court even conceded the right of the federal government to tax
the salaries of judges in the federal courts.

In the Court session of 1939-40, the National Labor Relations Board
was further strengthened in its execution of the Wagner Act. In the case
of Apex Hosiery vs. Leader, labor unions were granted further immunity
from anti-trust laws. In the case of Anthracite Coal Co. vs. Adkins the
court upheld the Bituminous Coal Act, which was much like the Guffey
Act of 1936, that the Court had declared unconstitutional. The power
of the Interstate Commerce Commission over railroad consolidations was
strengthened in the case of U.S. vs. Lowden. A number of decisions
further protected civil liberties. Weiss vs. U.8. continued the ban on
wire-tapping. Schneider vs. Irving ton upheld the right to distribute
handbills on the streets. Third degree methods were denounced in the
cases of Chambers vs. Florida and White vs. Texas, in both of which
Justice Black wrote the majority opinion. In the case of Avery vs.
Alabama, the constitutional right of a defendant to counsel was upheld.
But civil liberties suffered a severe set-back in the case of Minersville
School District vs. Gobitis, involving the rights of religious minorities,
in this case, the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses. The decision was written
by,' of all persons, Justice Frankfurter. It represented a symptom of the
reactionary trend in the face of war hysteria. As Robert E. Cushman
observes, "Mr. Justice Stone's dissenting opinion deserves a place in the
classic literature of civil liberty." It completely pulverized the reason-
ing of Justice Frankfurter and the majority. The reaction continued in
another Jehovah's Witnesses case in the 1941-42 session, when the Court
upheld the right of cities to impose a license fee for the distribution of
non-commercial literature.

Another symptom of the reaction prompted by defense and war threats
came in the session of 1940-41, when Justice Frankfurter read another
majority decision that limited the right of unions to picket. But, in the
same session the Court upheld the Wages and Hours Act, holding that
interstate commerce is wholly within the control of Congress. In this
(Darby) case, the Court opened the way for anti-child labor legislation
by specifically overruling Hammer vs. Dagenhart. When Justice Frank-

LAW IN ACTION 417

furter wrote the majority decision in the Phelps Dodge Case, declaring
that the NLRB could compel employers to hire men who had been re-
fused employment because of union affiliations, it was a far cry from
the Hitchman case and "Yellow Dog" days. A racial rights case in this
session promoted civil liberties. Late in April, 1941, the Court declared
that Negroes are entitled to the same first-class accommodations in
Pullman cars as white passengers. By the end of the 1940-41 session,
the Court had overruled by name ten important reactionary decisions
and a number of others by implication.

Therefore, while Mr. Roosevelt lost his Court plan, he at least tempo-
rarily accomplished his main objective, namely, the liberalization of the
Court and the protection of progressive legislation. But it would have
been better if he had won his fight for the Court bill. A change of tem-
per, due to current liberal ascendency on the bench, is not permanently
dependable.*13- Moreover, it does not touch the basic evil, namely, the
ability of the Court to declare Federal laws unconstitutional, especially
with the levity invited by the "due process" formula and the conception
of corporations as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. At any
rate, a new era in Court history has been opened, and its progress will be
watched with interest by all discerning Americans.

Corporation Law and Commercialized Legal Practice

The efficiency of the Supreme Court and corporations against legislative
interference has been made clear. But a certain amount of inconvenient
legislation has nevertheless been placed on the statute books and escaped
massacre by the Supreme Court. We shall in this section deal with the
manner in which the more eminent members of the legal profession have
aided American big business in evading or safely breaking such laws.

As Adolph A. Berle has pointed out, there are three main groups of
lawyers in the United States today. At the top arc the great legal
partnerships or legal factories, with their offices mainly in New York City
and Chicago.32 In this group, a firm may include from 30 to 75 partners,
as many as 300 associated attorneys, and do a business of many millions
of dollars each year:

The bulk of the really lucrative law business of the United States is probably
transacted by no more than three hundred metropolitan law firms. Many of
these firms are extremely large, although importance in the field of law does not
always depend on the size of the firm; some of the most influential legal partner-
ships consist of only two men.

The big firms may include as many as fifty to seventy-five partners and asso-
ciates, as well as a small army of salaried employees — stenographers, typists,
bookkeepers, clerks, and investigators, and in special instances certified account-
ants, engineers, tax experts, investment consultants, lobbyists, and general
research specialists. The big firms in New York, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere
occupy as much office space as a good-sized corporation does. . . .

81aC/. Raymond Moley, "The Boot Is On the Other Leg," News-Week, July 29,
1942.

82 For an excellent description of these great legal concerns, see Ferdinand Lund-
berg, "The Law Factories," Harper's, July, 1939, pp. 180 ff. For statistics, see p. 188.
See also Jackson, op. tit., p. 275.

418 LAW IN ACTION

These big law firms have sprung up like shadows alongside the great corpo-
rations and banks. . . .

Until fairly recently one large New York law firm regularly adhered to a
three-shift factory schedule of eight hours a shift, its offices never being dark
except over week-ends.83

Much of the actual work in these big firms is done for a pittance by
recent law-school graduates. The eminent lawyers at the top devote
themselves primarily to exploiting their economic, political, and social
connections to attract business. Their social functions are often more
important than their legal activities. They gain repute and get addi-
tional business by attendance at all elaborate social functions. One
writer has said that if many poor lawyers get business as ambulance-
chasers, it is equally true that top lawyers in great legal factories get
much of their business as "banquet-chasers." These big firms are con-
cerned chiefly with corporation and commercial law. Often they do not
play an important part in actual courtroom work, since their function is
mainly to give advice enabling their clients to operate in so adroit a
fashion as to keep out of the courtroom. As Judge Learned Hand once
said: "With the courts they have no dealings whatever, and would hardly
know what to do if they came there."

The more prominent members of these firms have tended to dominate
the bar associations of the country and to keep the legal philosophy of
the latter in harmony with the policies of big business. Despite their
vast and lucrative practice, these lawyers have done next to nothing
in the way of contributing to substantial legal literature or public leader-
ship through legal channels, though some, like Paul D. Cravath and
Robert T. Swaine, have veritably converted the technique of big business,
especially corporate reorganization, into legal literature. They have been
the bulwarks of big business, using their tremendous influence in opposing
legislation designed to curb the freedom of big business and corporate
wealth. For example, these legal luminaries constituted the "front" for
the Liberty League, organized in 1935 to combat the New Deal.

The brains behind this type of law firm is what is known as "the
lawyers' lawyer." He is a master of the technicalities and the hidden
recesses of the law. If a case can be won by legal ledgerdemain or suc-
cessfully argued on appeal, he knows how it can be done. He is not
usually so well-known, honored, or well-paid as are the "fronts," often
"stuffed shirts," who get the business for the firm by hobnobbing with
corporate moguls. But he "delivers the goods" in putting the subtleties
of the law and the fog of legal jargon at the service of the corporate
interests. Professor Rodell thus describes the "lawyers' lawyer."

The kind of lawyer who is never lost for legal language, who would never think
of countering a legal principle with a practical argument but only with another
legal principle, who would never dream of questioning any of the processes of
The Law — that kind of lawyer is the pride and joy of the profession. He is
what almost every lawyer tries hardest to be. He is known as the "lawyers'
lawyer."

88 Lundberg, loc. cit., July, 1939, pp. 180-181.

LAW IN ACTION 419

Except in a purely professional capacity, in which capacity they can be both
useful and expensive, you will do well to keep away from lawyers' lawyers.
They are walking, talking exhibits of the lawyers' belief in their own nonsense.
They are the epitome of the intellectual inbreeding that infests the whole legal
fraternity.

And since lawyers' lawyers are the idols of their fellows, it is small wonder
that lawyers take their Law and their legal talk in dead earnest. It is small
wonder that they think a "vested interest subject to be divested" or a frankly
"incorporoeal hereditament" is as real and definite and substantial as a brick
outhouse. For the sad fact is that almost every lawyer, in his heart and in his
own small way, is a lawyers' lawyer.34

Below the great moguls of the legal profession, and their sweated clerks
in the law factories, are the firms of from three to twenty lawyers who
usually lead in the actual courtroom practice of our larger cities. Their
practice is limited primarily to the civil law and the more lucrative cases
therein. They also supply the top criminal lawyers. They frequently
take a prominent part in municipal politics and occasionally make some
contribution to legal thought and scholarship.84*

The general evolution of these two groups of lawyers and tfre mental
attitudes which dominate them has been well stated by the distinguished
lawyer, Julius Henry Cohen:

Since I860 a great change has come over our land. The nation was torn with
a battle over a great moral principle. After the war, a period of reconstruction,
a period of commercial prosperity followed, such as had never been seen before.
The brain and hand of the lawyer then became devoted not to the expounding
of the law and the application of moral principles in decisions and legislation,
but to the formulation of plans, schemes and contrivances for the commercial
captains of the day. Not to the service of his country, but to the service of
his clients' enterprises the lawyer became dedicated. In and out of the statutes
he crawled, seeking to find that which would aid his lord, the great commercial
baron, to build up the great aggregations of wealth now dominant in this country.
He was no longer a student in morals, he was no longer a groat statesman, a
great orator, a great patriot. He became the servant of his master.35

It is obvious that only the rich can lay claim to the services of these
two groups of lawyers. Their fees are often enormous. A fee of $1,000
a day is not at all uncommon for court appearances, and it may rise much
higher. It is stated that William Fox paid Samuel Untermeycr no less
than a million dollars in his fight with Wall Street moguls and other movie
companies. Max Steuer, a famous criminal lawyer and noted also in
civil practice, said that he averaged half a million dollars a year in the
latter part of his life. Payment of a million dollar fee is not uncommon
in important public utility cases. It is believed that the largest fee ever
paid an American lawyer was one of some 11 million dollars, paid to
William Nelson Cromwell by the New Panama Canal Company of France
for arranging the sale of its rights to the government of the United States
and thus clearing the way for the construction of the Panama Canal.

34 Rodell, op. cit., pp. 196-197. Reprinted by permission.

34aFor an extremely interesting and discerning account of this type of legal prac-
tice, see A. G. Hays, City Lawyer, Simon and Schuster, 1942.
85 Cited in Gisnet, op. cit., pp. 36-37.

420 LAW IN ACTION

At the other extreme, forming the third group of lawyers — the great
mass of everyday lawyers who practice either alone or in partnership
and who are devoted chiefly to criminal law and to personal and small
business affairs — one out of every ten in New York City qualified for
relief on a pauper's oath in 1935. Adolf A. Berle thus describes the
range and composition of the rank-and-file lawyers of the country:

They run the entire gamut from the lawyer who seeks chiefly to be a human
being to the marching lawyer, who finds it necessary to make his living by dubious
means, chasing ambulances or carrying on doubtful litigation for revenue only.
While the upper limits of this class frequently produce unexceptionable indi-
viduals, the lower limits in the great cities lie dangerously close to the criminal
class.36

The suitability of the law factory to corporate practice, and the nature
of its clientele, are well stated by Lundberg:

The law factory, a sort of composite lawyer, offers services to corporations
whose interests are far beyond the capacity of one lawyer or a limited group
of lawyers to handle. The division of labor in the lame law office is absolutely
necessary to the well-being of the giant corporation, which, served by a big law
firm, knows that certain partners and groups of partners are devoting all their
time to particular phases of its business. Furthermore, the corporation, touching
society at so many points, is involved in such a mass of cases requiring simul-
taneous attention that a restricted group of lawyers could hardly begin to give
it the attention it needs. . . .

The big firm usually devotes itself to the affairs of the major corporations in
certain fields, and may even specialize in the type of corporation it serves. Thus
some law firms have among their clients mainly public-utility holding companies,
chain-store systems, department stores, or theatrical producers; manufacturing
companies, mining corporations, railroads, or holding and investment companies
and banks. Ordinarily the clientele is headed by a bank or cluster of banks,
after which the holding and operating companies in the sphere of this banking
group follow in logical order. The private business that these firms handle for
individuals is chiefly derived from officers or leading stockholders of such a
segment of corporations and banks, or from members of their families.87

It is frequently supposed that these aristocrats of the legal profession
never stoop to solicit business — that more comes to them than they can
take care of. Mr. Jackson punctures this illusion:

The big lawyer solicits legal business by participating in the acquisition of
business enterprises, utilities, investment trusts; by seeking directorates in banks,
trust companies, title companies and other business corporations; by employing
or engaging in partnership with influential lawyers, public officials or ex-public
officials, who act solely as business-getters. The little lawyer solicits negligence
and divorce business, joins clubs and lodges and seeks publicity, for similar pur-
poses . . . it is as imperative for big lawyers to get business to survive as it is
for little lawyers to get business to live. The result is competition for business,
which starts with solicitation and ends in yielding any barrier of restraining pro-
fessional standards to clients who seek results only and are not concerned with
methods.88

36 Berle, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 9, p. 342.

87 Lundberg, Harper's, July, 1939, p. 183.

88 Jackson, op. tit., pp. 274, 275.

LAW IN ACTION 421

As former Chief Justice Frederick E. Crane of the New York State
Court of Appeals pointed out, these opulent potentates of the legal pro-
fession have set the pace for that commercialization of legal practice
and legal ideals which distresses so many candid students of the law in
our day:

May I not ask who has commercialized our law ? Has it been the humble and
lowly practitioner or the man at the top? How much of the practice today is
the organizing and developing of business enterprises in which the lawyer's large
return is dependent upon the value of stocks and bonds, of which he has a part?
How many of our lawyers have gone into business and are carrying on business
as executives and officials in connection with their law offices? I ask you in all
fairness whether a good example has been held up before the younger members
of the profession — young men looking for ideals — by many of our leading lawyers
who enter into all kinds of commercial enterprises to make money?39

Justice Louis D. Brandeis once observed that "the leading lawyers of
the United States have been engaged mainly in supporting the claims
of the corporations: often in endeavoring to aid or nullify the extremely
crude laws by which legislators sought to regulate the power or curb the
excesses of corporations." 40 Professor Rodell points out that their work
has had little relation to real justice: "The corporations know and the
lawyers know that a master manipulator of legal mumbo- jumbo is a far
more useful thing to have on your side than all the certain and impartial
justice in the world." 41

Most notable has been the work of these big legal firms in making
clear how the anti-trust laws might be escaped and economic control
concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. They are responsible
for the invention of the holding company and subsidiary corporations,
whereby the Sherman Anti-trust Law and the Clayton Act have been
successfully circumvented. By such clever devices as the issuance of
non-voting stock, the utilization of proxies, voting trusts, and other legal
hocus-pocus, a small group of insiders have been able to get control of
our vast corporations and holding companies, thus separating ownership
from control and leading to all the numerous abuses of finance capitalism,
which lie at the heart of the evils of American capitalism.42

There is much talk, and rightly so, about the great burden imposed
upon the people of the United States by our ordinary crime bill and the
levies of racketeers. But little attempt has been made to estimate care-
fully just what the skulduggery of our great corporate potentates has
cost the rank and file of American investors. Under the advice of crafty
lawyers, businessmen and other individuals and corporations, whose lia-
bilities have reached a somewhat alarming or distressing level, took
advantage of our liberal bankruptcy laws to prevent the creditors from
realizing anything like their legitimate claims on the estate and property

89 Cited in Gisnet, op. cit., p. 88.

40 Cited by Ferdinand Lundberg, Harper's, December, 1938, p. 1.

41 Op. cit., p. 230.

42 See above, pp. 127 ff.

422 LAW IN ACTION

of the bankrupt. It has been estimated by careful students of the
problem that creditors have been cheated out of from 500 to 800 million
dollars annually. As Ferdinand Lundberg puts it:

There has been one common denominator in all the scandals uncovered in
Washington and in the bankruptcy courts in recent years: it was lawyers who
gave the advice that landed their clients in the dock before the country, although
the lawyers have not been blamed, have not even been regarded as a social factor,
by the lawyer-legislators and judges conducting the inquiries. Instill, Krueger,
the Van Sweringen brothers, and others with their complicated schemes, all
worked through the medium of high-priced attorneys, but although the average
newspaper reader could tell much about the principals, it is doubtful if they could
mention one attorney who worked out the plans that carne to grief at great cost
to thousands of investors.43

Nothing could be in worse taste than the frequent spectacle of a sleek
and socially prominent corporation lawyer denouncing with vehemence
one of his lesser brothers who is suspected of giving aid and counsel to
the leaders of one of the conventional American rackets or of being in-
volved in ambulance-chasing. The difference lies mainly in the classes
with which they work, rather than in the ethics of their acts. The
corporation lawyer advises what Professor E. H. Sutherland calls "the
white collar criminal/7 while the ambulance-chaser gets his "cut" out of
human misfortunes, and the lawyer-criminal gives advice to the racketeer.

The bankruptcy law and practice have been amended under the New
Deal, and it is becoming less easy to cheat creditors. Strong credit asso-
ciations have sprung up in most trades, and the remedies given by the new
bankruptcy law are such that it is mainly the fault of a lawyer if his
client allows the bankrupt to "get away" with anything. But the un-
represented or incompetently represented creditor can still be fleeced.

Closely associated with the bankruptcy racket is the receivership racket.
We have already pointed out that a receivership is the natural finish of
the life history of one of our corporations, under the control of finance
capitalism. After exploitation has run its complete course, the tottering
concern is thrown into a receivership and the exploiters, aided by cor-
poration lawyers and friendly judges, make off with the corpse.44

Ah extremely remunerative quasi-racket associated with bankruptcies,
foreclosures, and receiverships is the fee system. It is used by corpora-
tion lawyers and judicial officers alike. The evils were once thoroughly
exposed by Mitchell Dawson of the Illinois bar in an article on "The
Fee Feed-Bag" in The American Mercury.45

The fee system had its origin in the institution of the Justice of the
Peace, which we took hook, line, and sinker from Britain. As one wag
has remarked, this meant quite literally "paying for justice by the piece,"
like any other commodity. The justice usually gets no salary and must
secure his income from fees. The justices are on the fee system in most

43 Lundberg, Harper's, December, 1938, p. 5.

44 C/. Jackson, op. cit., pp. 225 ff. See above, pp. 128-129.

45 Loc. cit., June, 1932.

LAW IN ACTION 423

of our states. The fee system puts a premium on conviction and favor-
itism. If the justice convicts a man in a criminal case he gets his fee
directly and promptly. If he acquits, he must get it through appeal to the
county, accompanied by delay and red tape. In civil cases, the justice
will not get much work unless he has developed a reputation for de-
pendability with a large clientele who can refer cases to him with assur-
ance. As a result, it is a popular saying in civil cases that "J.P." stands,
not for justice of the peace but for judgment for the plaintiff.

Far more serious, however, is the fee system as it operates with re-
ceivers, their attorneys, rnasters-in-chancery and the like — all more
powerful, glamorous, and expensive than the humble justices. There is
here an impressive record of political favoritism in appointments and of
high fees rendered for services. Take bank receiverships. They are
probably the most efficient of the lot, the best supervised, and the freest
from political venality. In the case of receivers for closed federal banks
the Comptroller of the Currency makes the selections. Yet there is
plenty of evidence that even bank receiverships are often political plums:

In one urban district, for instance, a casual inspection discloses that bank
receiverships have been handed out to a party leader in the State Legislature,
a former public administrator, the son of a county commissioner, the husband
of a former collector of internal revenue, a former treasurer of a park board, a
former assistant to a probate judge. The political hook-up is even more striking
when we examine a list of those appointed as attorneys for bank receivers.46

Even in the case of federal receiverships, where the fees are supervised
by the federal courts, vast sums are eaten up in fees and administrative
costs: "The report of the Attorney General of the United States shows
that the fees allowed to receivers, trustees, masters, marshals and
attorneys in bankruptcy cases alone, for the year ending June 30, 1931,
amounted to $9,711,605, and that other expenses of administration brought
the total cost to $19,777,068 for collecting and distributing assets valued
at $89,535,070. ... A motley congregation of parasites swarms through
every bankrupt estate, demanding fees, knowing they will be paid." 47

Fees in state bank receiverships are less controlled than those in na-
tional bank cases. In one case, a bank had resources of $975,161 and
deposits of $1,228,704. Over a period of 18 months the receiver got
$20,340, his attorney $19,378, and clerical help $24,130. But not a cent
in dividends was paid to the creditors. Masters-in-chancery are espe-
cially notorious for their charges. One asked $118,000 for 282 days of
service of five hours each. The court finally cut it to $49,250.

When it comes to such lucrative and very loosely supervised plums as
receiverships for business blocks, apartment houses, and the like, the
situation has, quite literally, attained the proportions of a racket. In
the case of one apartment hotel, the receiver reported a gross income of
$459,017 but a net income, before interest, depreciation, and amortization,

^Ibid.

424 LAW IN ACTION

of only $4,392. The lax laws permitting the continuance of the scandal-
ous bankruptcy racket gave rise to the fact that an average of about ten
cents on the dollar was all that was collected for creditors. Mr. Dawson's
conclusions seem warranted by the facts he brings forward:

No reasonable person can doubt that the system of paying public officials
directly by fees is wasteful and demoralizing, . , . The remedy for the fee
system, like that for any parasitic growth, is complete excision. . . . The public
would do well to devote its energies towards removing the feed-bag beyond the
hungry reach of officialdom, rather than to waste time over fees that have already
been apportioned and consumed.48

The fees received in corporate reorganizations are even more out-
rageous, and until recently they were unrestrained. In the reorganization
of the Paramount-Publix Corporation, a federal judge approved fees of
over a million dollars. This was less than half the fees originally de-
manded. In the reorganization of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul
Railroad, the lawyers' fees ran between $500,000 and $750,000. Over a
million dollars was paid the lawyers for reorganizing the American Bond
and Mortgage Company.

Under the New Deal, the worst aspects of the receivership racket and
cxhorbitant fees have been corrected, in part. The Securities and Ex-
change Commission now takes over supervision of receiverships and reor-
ganizations and demands the disclosure of all relevant information con-
cerning the acts of committees and the like. Railroad receiverships and
reorganizations are supervised by the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Both this body and the SEC, as well as the courts, now pass on the fees
charged.

A lucrative racket connected with the more elegant phases of law
practice is the trust fund business. Lawyers frequently advise persons
with considerable estates to hand them over to trust companies. This
advice is given with apparent disinterestedness for the good of the client.
But, all too often, the lawyer is acting in collusion with a trust company
and gets a fee for his persuasive efforts. As Fred C. Kelly points out
in his interesting book on trust companies and trust funds, How to Lose
Your Money Prudently: "Another shady practice which appears to have
gained headway is that of collusion between lawyers drawing wills and
trust companies which are appointed trustees upon their supposedly
disinterested advice." 40 Mr, Kelly quotes sharp criticism of this prac-
tice by Surrogate Judge George A. Slater of Westchester County, New
York, and Henry W. Jessup of the New York City bar.50

Mr. Kelly's book affords ample .evidence that even the best trust
companies are all too often lacking in sagacity in handling the portfolios
of securities left in the estate, and that many of them are guilty of quasi-
criminal lethargy and indifference to all responsibilities save for collect-

48 Dawson, loc. cit .

49 Op. cit., Swain, 1933, p. 74.
«°/btc*., pp. 74-83.

LAW IN ACTION 425

ing their fees and commissions. Even worse is the frequent practice of
unloading on estates questionable bonds, which are transferred to trust
accounts through dealings with a subordinate bond house affiliated with
the trust company. Mr. Kelly recommends the following precautions
to be followed by those who insist on putting estates in the hands of trust
companies :

Until such time as law courts begin to show greater concern for protection of
the customer as opposed to the trust company, the person who is nevertheless
willing to risk his money in a trust fund may at least protect himself by observing
the following half dozen rules:

1. Have the will or trust indenture drawn by an independent lawyer whom
you have reason to trust.

2. Never place a trust fund in any bank or trust company which has a bond
department or is affiliated with any bond house, or which has anything to sell you.

3. Before permitting a trust company to handle your funds, investigate the
laws of your own state regulating trust companies and do not take for granted
protection not specifically guaranteed.

4. Never make a will naming a trust company your executor without knowing
in advance exactly what their charges are going to be.

5. Always remember, in dealing with a trust company, that impressive stone
pillars in front of a bank Imve no intelligence, but your funds will be handled
by bank employees. Look into the experience and ability of those men with
whom you deal.

6. Rid yourself of the idea, promoted by trust company advertising, that a
trust fund is completely safe, and be on your guard, just as you would in any
other business transaction.51

The leaders of the first and second groups of lawyers whom we de-
scribed at the outset of this section render another definite service to
organized corporate wealth in this country, namely, the role they assume
in preparing and arguing cases involving the constitutionality of legisla-
tion designed to curb the freedom of predatory wealth and to bring
corporations under proper social control through legislation. These men
not only employ their own legal acumen and that of their underlings, but
also capitalize upon their public eminence and their previous relations
with members of the bench of the federal and other courts to influence
the judges before whom their argument is delivered. Not a few victories
have been won primarily as a result of the personal prestige and influence
of the attorney who appeared before the court. His personality is usually
more potent than his argument.

While the great legal partnerships are still the most powerful element
in the legal profession, they do not have the income, strength, or prestige
that they did before 1933, and especially before the crash of 1929. The
holding companies themselves, which were the main source of their power,
are disintegrating or have already been broken up as a result of the
Investment Trust Act, The Securities Act, the Securities and Exchange
Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the like. Their in-
vestment clients, the bankers, who were mainly responsible for the power

Op. cit., pp. 102-103

426 LAW IN ACTION

of the corporation lawyers, have also lost out in the process. Competitive
bidding, registration rules, supervision of underwriting and legal fees,
restrictions on corporate acts, and adverse judgments of courts in stock-
holders' suits have broken the spell and shattered the power of both the
holding companies and the investment banks.

Having surveyed briefly the activities and interests of the two classes of
lawyers at the top of the legal profession, we may now turn to the doings
of the third main group of lawyers, the great majority who make up the
rank-and-file practitioners of law.

Activities and Methods of Rank-and-File Lawyers

Ironically, the current decline in legal ethics and the mounting evils of
legal practice have come about at a time when lawyers are far better
educated and have a vastly superior professional training than at any
previous time in American history. Only a generation ago lawyers were
not required to attend a law school. They were permitted to "read law"
in the office of some practicing attorney and then take a not too exacting
bar examination. Today, all lawyers must have professional training,
and the better law schools are graduate schools, admitting only students
who have a bachelor's degree. And the bar examinations are becoming
ever more stringent. In spite of this, there are far more lawyers prac-
ticing today than ever before. Their numbers have grown at a rate even
faster than the growth of American population or the evolution of
American business. There are, at the present time, nearly 200,000 prac-
ticing lawyers in the United States. There are around 12,000 students
in the law schools of New York City alone as compared with some 2,700
in 1916. The New York Law Journal thus described the situation back
in 1928, when there were fewer lawyers and law students than' today:

The law schools are turning out the young lawyers more rapidly even than
Henry Ford turned out the old model of the Tin Lizzie. Lawyers shoot forth
as speedily as meteors across the heaven on a clear July night.52

In the same way that the growth of corporate wealth, power, venality,
and avarice have been the chief causes of the corruption of legal practice
among the rich leaders of the profession, so the large increase in the
rank-and-file of practicing attorneys has been an outstanding cause of
the evils which prevail in the activities of the great majority of practicing
lawyers today. The condition has been aggravated by the fact that, at
the very moment when lawyers became much more numerous than pre-
viously, the possible forms of employment for the average lawyer have
been greatly curtailed by the development of new trends.

Title, guaranty, and trust companies are taking over more and more
work in the real estate business, such as the searching of titles, convey-
ancing of properties, and the drawing up of mortgages. The handling

52 Cited in Gisnet, op. cit.f p. 45

LAW IN ACTION 427

of the estates of deceased persons is being handed over ever more fre-
quently to trust companies. Credit and collection agencies are getting
more and more of the business involved in the collection of delinquent
accounts. Casualty companies are constantly appropriating an ever
larger section of the business involved in negligence cases. While trust
companies and the like have to employ trained lawyers to $o their work,
efficient methods and the handing over of a good deal qf the work to
accountants, and others not technically lawyers, greatly reduces the
number of attorneys necessary. Moreover, the abuses and delays in
courtroom practice are leading more and more lawyers to recommend to
their clients that they settle cases out of court, often a commendable
procedure but one which cuts in seriously on the trial work hitherto open
to lawyers. A less serious invasion of previous legal activities is to be
seen in the juvenile court, which is becoming ever less of a criminal court,
and where the lawyer is being superseded by the psychiatrist and the
social worker.

The desperate economic situation of the lesser lawyers in the country
which has grown jointly out of the increase in the number of lawyers and
the curtailment of the scope of legal employment has been well described
by I. Maurice Wormser:

To a large degree the troubles among the Metropolitan lawyers arise from
economic causes. The lawyer has seen himself slowly stripped of a vast amount
of legal practice. The practice of law in many fields is no longer a matter for
attorneys. Powerful and wealthy corporations boldly trespass upon the licit
domains of lawyers. The title companies, the insurance companies, the trust
companies, the powerful corporations, are spreading their tentacles around an
apparently helpless profession. The defense of negligence suits has been taken
over almost entirely by corporations. The handling of wills and estates is no
longer the province of the lawyer. Great corporations do sixty per cent of
corporate law work. We can remember when title searching was the forte of
the attorney. Today, except in the rural districts, title searching has passed
out of lawyers' hands. The prosecution of claims now provided for by the
Workmen's Compensation Law has closed another field of practice formerly open.
Arbitration and conciliation have made vast strides. In some important in-
dustries, as for example, the silk trade, litigation is becoming unknown. The
illegal practice of law among foreigners, particularly notaries public and com-
missioners of deeds, is another encroachment. Last, but not least, attorneys are
faced with an ever growing influx of Portias, some of whom are remarkably
efficient and all of them are willing to work for excessively low wages. In the
light of all this, can it be doubted there is ground for economic discontent? Is
there any room for question that the lawyers' domain is being lessened? Can
any fair-minded person question that the conditions arising from this cause are
serious? 53

As only a fortunate few can gain access to the charmed circle of lawyers
who control the lucrative practice of corporation and commercial law,
the ever-increasing number of lawyers have to get out and hustle simply
to make a living. The lawyers are handicapped by the fact that, like
doctors, they are prevented by the ethics of the legal profession from

68 Cited in Gisnet, op. cit., pp. 52-54.

428 LAW IN ACTION

overt advertising. This is a strange restriction, in the light of the highly
elastic character of legal ethics. Nevertheless, it is a taboo respected by
the majority of lawyers. While there are a certain number of petty real
estate and other business cases which may be picked up by these lesser
lawyers, their main field is what we know as negligence cases, chiefly
accidents of one sort or another. Prior to 1920, most of these accidents
were industrial accidents. When automobile accidents began to out-
number all others of a serious character, they dominated negligence prac-
tices, which now closely approximates the proportions and methods of a
legal racket.

The methods employed to drum up negligence cases have been as
diversified and obvious as the desperation of the lawyer's economic con-
dition implies. Most notorious is "ambulance-chasing." Lawyers hire
"runners" whose job is to be on the scene of the accident first, to contact
the injured party and possible witnesses. The runner turns over the
information to the lawyer, who then makes a proposal to the injured
person on the basis of what is known as the contingent fee principle. He
agrees to bring action for damages for a fixed proportion of the sum
awarded, usually half of the damages.

The essential elements of success in ambulance-chasing are closely
knit organization and great speed in operation. The core of the operating
force are the runners, who are most effective in conjunction with "fixed"
policemen who tip off the runners often before reporting the accident to
headquarters. Usually the lawyer employs at least two runners, and if
they are alert, they will bring in 30 good hospital cases a year, represent-
ing a gross business, on the average, of $300,000.

Many of the luminaries of corporation law develop a fine sense of
indignation against the so-called ambulance-chasers. But the latter have
often rendered a real service to the poor, who would not be able to get any
legal assistance otherwise. Half the damages is better than nothing at
all. This was particularly true before workmen's compensation laws
were put on the statute books. But in most states injured persons still
need a lawyer to represent them even since compensation laws have been
passed. The employers or the insurance company are represented by
clever attorneys and the claimant is at a great disadvantage unless he
has good legal advice.

The ambulance-chasing lawyers, operating on a contingent fee basis,
are a nuisance mainly when they abuse the system. All too often a
veritable racket develops. Doctors and hospital employees are corrupted
and given their "cut-in." There is no regard for fact or reality. One
dancer hurt her head in a taxi accident, but the racketeer-lawyer sued
for damages due to fallen arches, since the dancer's feet were more
valuable than her head.

Lawyers will freely take the cases of guilty persons in automobile acci-
dents and urge them to bring suit for damages. In one not unusual case,
known to the writer, an irresponsible and drunken individual pulled out
of the line of traffic and smashed into a careful driver who was proceeding

LAW IN ACTION 429

on his side of the road. It was a plain case of criminal negligence and
there were witnesses to the accident to testify thereunto. The guilty
party should certainly have received a jail sentence. But the person he
injured had insurance. A shyster lawyer took the case, sued for damages,
and the jury, believe it or not, awarded damages to a man who should
have been imprisoned for recklessness. There are thousands of such
cases annually in the United States. It is in instances of this sort, which
bring about a gross miscarriage of justice, that ambulance-chasing is a
nuisance which should be suppressed.

By and large, however, casualty companies and insurance adjusters are
guilty of just as reprehensible practices. This fact was well brought out
by Judge Wasservogel:

The evidence before me shows that casualty companies, transportation com-
panies and corporate defendants have engaged in practices eaually reprehensible.
Frequently the insurance adjuster races with the ambulance chaser to the bedside
of the injured person to obtain a release from him while he is overwrought and
in pressing need of money. If a release cannot be obtained, the injured person
is asked to sign a statement of the circumstances of the accident or is plied with
questions. The oral or written statements extracted do not present a fair or
complete picture. Nevertheless they are used against the plaintiff at the trial
with exaggerated and harmful effect. Furthermore, the representatives of some
corporate defendants have not hesitated to effect settlements directly with
claimants whom they knew to be represented by attorneys. This practice is
unfair to such attorneys and deprives the clients of the benefit of their advice.54

A new development which takes millions from innocent people yearly
is the so-called "faked-claims racket," in which there has either been no
accident at ,all or the accident has been staged for the purpose of launch-
ing a damage suit. Its victims are found chiefly among the relatively
ignorant, poor, and helpless, for a rich man usually turns such matters
over to his lawyer for investigation. But even in such cases the crooks
often clean up, for juries are prone to be sympathetic with the fakery
artists whose tricks they do not understand. The general pattern of the
racket is made clear by Robert Monaghan:

If youVe got a job or a small business, if you are a professional man or if you
demonstrate solvency in any other way, you're an easy target for these little
squeeze plays.

Once the claim artist has the facts on your ability to pay he can slip behind
your automobile and swear you struck him down. He can trip on your sidewalk,
stumble over your doorsill, declare your dog chewed a piece out of his thieving
hide or work any of a dozen other dodges.55

Some of this fake-claims racket is carried on by lone wolves, and often
they "make a killing." But most of the extortion is carried on by a well-
organized syndicate, usually headed by a lawyer in good standing as a
member of the bar. He has a whole staff at his call — other lawyers,
runners, doctors, hospital attendants, X-ray technicians, and professional

54 Gisnet, op. cit., p. 77.

ss "The Fake Claims Racket," Forum, February, 1940, pp. 87-91.

430 LAW IN ACTION

perjurers. Some of these syndicates have regular accident-faking head-
quarters. Such was the "House of Pain" maintained by a Pittsburgh
syndicate, which cleaned up millions of dollars before it was closed up.

The most extreme examples of this racket, but not uncommon ones,
represent complete fakery. A man, upon going to his parked car, for
example, may find himself accosted by men with a damaged car. The
innocent party will be accused of having caused the damage. He
protests the fraud, but to no avail. A suit is threatened and, unless the
man has an impregnable alibi, his lawyer will usually advise him to settle
the case out of court for a hundred dollars or so. Submitting to this
extortion is cheaper than defending the case in court, for nobody can
guess how erratic a jury may be, even though the fraud is palpable.

The fake-claims racket meets little opposition from "the strong arm
of the law/' since its minions are often in on the "cut." The greatest
progress in breaking up the racket has been made by a private organiza-
tion— the Association of Casualty and Surety Executives, whose fraud-
fighting department is known as the Claims Bureau. This has succeeded
in putting the fear of God into the racketeers in some cities, notably
Boston.

In order to rake up criminal cases, lawyers frequently have rustlers who
circulate in the magistrates' courts, snooping for cases which they report
to the attorney. Bondsmen, court attendants, and policemen also call
criminal cases to the attention of such lawyers. Frequently the lawyer
himself hangs around courtrooms when he is not busy and looks for
cases. Raymond Moley describes such procedure:

The lawyer himself is active in the scramble for cases. He sometimes comes
to the court daily, deposits his coat and hat immediately upon arrival, and
participates in the activities exactly as though he were a paid attache. He chats
with policemen, bondsmen, attendants, even the magistrate. He mingles freely
with the unfortunates who are waiting in the court, and so gets business first-
hand. He has, with two or three others who monopolize most of the cases in
that particular court, a permanent status there. He is a "regular." He is as
definitely a part of the court machinery as the clerk, the prosecutor and the
judge.68

The worst abuses in connection with rustling criminal cases take place
when victims are actually framed and then ruthlessly exploited by
shyster lawyers. Professor Moley recounts a characteristic case:

According to the testimony of one witness who was "framed," her lawyer
answered her protests over the huge fee demanded by saying, "Now don't worry,
my child, I'm not one of those who just plunder people/'

Reassured, she paid him $150 on account. Before the trial, however, he
continued to remind her that though he had influence in court she must give him
more money or he could do nothing for her. She paid him $100 more. Half
an hour before her trial he called her to his office and said, "If -you do not give
me $100 more immediately, something will happen."

The terrified woman promised to scrape together half that amount. This she

se The New York Times, May 3, 1931.

LAW IN ACTION 431

gave him after she had been tried and discharged. But the lawyer insisted that
she owed him "the rest of the $100." This, too, was handed over and the woman
finally got a receipt for payment in full. The matter did not end there, however.
She continued to receive, by letter and telephone, regular demands for more
money. When the lawyer was questioned he declared that he did not recall
how much this client had paid him. He thought, however, that "there was a
little balance still due." 57

In the old days, the criminal lawyer who defended anybody, whether
guilty or not, was looked upon as being at the bottom of the legal ladder,
from the standpoint of legal ethics. But he has since been nosed out of
the legal cellar by what is now known as the lawyer-criminal, namely,
the lawyer who gives advice to organized criminals and racketeers. In
the olden times, the smart criminal was one who got an able lawyer to
defend him after he committed a crime. But today, taking a leaf out of
the book of the corporate mogul, the bright racketeer gets a lawyer before
he commits a crime. Most organized crime today is committed on
advice of counsel. The broad similarity between this procedure and
corporation law practice has been pointed out by Mr. Jackson:

Nor does the public mind any longer distinguish between the gangster-lawyer
and the banker-lawyer in this respect. It knows that in these instances the
racketeer and his lawyer have merely adopted the methods and practices of our
best people for their own. The racketeer who asks a lawyer to set up an alibi
for him before he goes out "to knock off a rival gangster" is emulating the
financiers who retain counsel to advise them how they can sell watered securities
or gilded bonds of an insolvent and defaulting South American republic to a
gullible public, without liability to themselves. The gangsters are merely stealing
the methods of respected, church-going leaders of industry who brag that they
hire lawyers to tell them what laws they need not respect. What difference is
there, asks John Q. Public, between the lawyer who advises the banker how he
can avoid the penalties of a Securities Act, and the lawyer who tells a gangster
how he can avoid the provisions of an extortion statute ? 58

The bar expresses little indignation over legal services rendered to the
moguls of gangland. As Mr. Lundberg says: "Al Capone and other
eminent gangsters had the same set of skilled lawyers over a long period
6f years, and the courts have yet to express astonishment at counsellors
appearing time and again in court for the same thugs." 59 Indeed, as
Jackson and Lundberg point out, the lawyer is all but immune from
punishment for giving advice that lands his client in jail.60 Professor
Rodell insists that a lawyer can get away with almost anything, provided
he observes the correct legal etiquette — that is, plays the game according
to legal rules:

What the lawyers care about in a judge or a fellow lawyer is that he play the
legal game with the rest of them — that he talk their talk and respect their rules
and not go around sticking pins in their pretty principles. He can be a New

57 Ibid.; cf. Jackson, op. cit., pp. 155 ff.

58 Jackson, op. cit., p. 261.

69 Harper's, April, 1939, p. 521.

60 Jackson, op, cit., p. 263; and Lundberg, Harper's, December, 1938, pp. 3, 5.

432 LAW IN ACTION

Dealer or a Ku Kluxer or a Single Taxer or an advocate of free love, just so
long as he stays within the familiar framework of legal phraseology in expressing
his ideas and prejudices wherever they happen to impinge on The Law.61

While pointing out these offenses against both justice and common
decency, we should not fail to call attention to the numerous public-
spirited lawyers of high ability who have generously given their time
and talents in behalf of the poor and downtrodden. Clarence Darrow
was the most conspicuous example, but he did not by any means stand
alone. But such a public-spirited lawyer risks his reputation and prac-
tice. The distinguished Chicago lawyer, W. P. Black, who defended the
Chicago anarchists back in 1886, was all but ruined professionally. And
the equally distinguished Boston attorney, William G. Thompson, who
defended Sacco and Vanzetti, saw his practice cut in half.62

In spite of the large and increasing number of lawyers and their
desperate scramble to make a living, Mr. Lundberg usefully emphasizes
the fact that we would probably need twice as many lawyers as we have
today, if the masses were as well served by the bar as are the classes.
The reason that the mass of the lawyers now find it hard to make a living
is that the bulk of the people who need lawyers do not have enough
income to pay them. As Mr, Lundberg puts it:

In relation to the inability of most people to pay for legal services under the
present dispensation, it is true that there are too many lawyers. But in relation
to the social need for the services of lawyers the country could probably use a
bar with twice the present number.63

Probably this is all academic, however, since only in a just and efficient
economic system could the masses afford to pay for needed legal aid;
but in such a system they would require little legal advice. Russia
virtually gets along without any lawyers.

Some Outstanding Defects in the Criminal Law

Grave as may be the defects in our civil law, from the large scale
dignified corruption of corporation law practice to the petty venality of
ambulance-chasing, students of law and sociology alike agree that the
practice of criminal law represents the most debased and vulgar area of
legal practice and courtroom procedure. The subject has been handled
in admirable and comprehensive fashion by Professor Raymond Moley in
his book on Our Criminal Courts.

The whole philosophy of criminal law, namely, the attempt to find a
punishment to fit the crime, rather than the right treatment to fit a
particular criminal, is archaic, wrong-headed, and brutal. Some head-
way has been made in the way of getting indeterminate sentence laws,
but such success as has been achieved here has been mainly in the case of
juvenile delinquents. For the most part, the judges still impose a time

61 Rodell, op. cit., p. 196. Reprinted by permission.

62 Lundberg, "The Priesthood of the Law/' Harper's, April, 1939, p. 524.

63 "Thp Lpornl Prnfo«rairm " f? rimer's Dpppmhpr 1Q2fl n. 14.

LAW IN ACTION 433

sentence, though it is becoming more common to impose a maximum and
minimum sentence, the time actually served to depend upon the conduct
of the convict.

The first stage of criminal procedure in this country is characterized
by gross lawlessness and brutality. We refer to the Third Degree, which
the police apply to suspects after arrest in order to obtain a confession of
guilt. The Third Degree has been the subject of more heated interchange
of invective than any other phase of contemporary criminal jurispru-
dence in the United States. Reformers have charged that it is universal
in police practice, while the police have hotly contended that it is the
exception. There had been no comprehensive study of the actual facts,
over the country as a whole, until Ernest Jerome Hopkins reported the
situation for the Wickersham Commission. Emanuel Lavine's excellent
volume The Third Degree is a vivid book, but it was based too much
upon local New York evidence to constitute a decisive indictment of the
system through the nation as a whole. The same was true of the ex-
cellent report submitted by the Bar Association of New York, some time
back. Mr. Hopkins, however, made a thorough sampling of the situation
throughout the country and his report certainly proved that the brutal
application of third degree methods is so wide-spread that it may be
declared a general characteristic of American police procedure.04 Mr.
Hopkins found that about five out of every six cases of arrested suspects
are settled in outlaw police tribunals, either by forced confessions, which
the trial court simply ratifies, or by release by the police. As Mr. Hop-
kins puts it: "The outlaw pre-trial inquisition by police is by all odds
our predominating trial court in point of fact." In other words, the
majority of our criminal jurisprudence is quite literally official vigilante
justice.

The Hopkins report was in no way surprising to close students of
criminal justice. It only furnished authoritative confirmation of what
such students knew to be the case. The police employ diverse methods
of torture to secure confessions: beating; whipping; deprivation of sleep,
food, and water; electric carpets, rods and chairs; and various types of
psychic deception and intimidation. Many fatalities have resulted. The
Supreme Court of Virginia was restrained when it said of typical third
degree practices: "The evidence of the police officers as to the manner in
which the alleged confession of the accused was obtained reads like a
chapter from the history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages."

The lawlessness of the police inquisition and the Third Degree may be
seen from the comparison of the actual police procedure with the formal
law in the circumstances. The law states that: (1) the police shall
secure adequate evidence before arrest; (2) they shall promptly produce
the accused before a magistrate to be arraigned and committed or re-
leased; (3) the police may not, under the ban of the Fifth and Fourteenth
Amendments, even subject the accused to questioning as to his guilt;

64 This report was amplified and published as Our Lawless Police, Viking Press,
1931.

434 LAW IN ACTION

and (4) all matters pertaining to the decision as to the innocence or guilt
of the accused shall be left to a jury of his peers, presided over by an
impartial jurist.

This raises the vital question of the justification of the Third Degree.
Is it essential to the ascertainment of guilt? The answer may be given
in the form of a categorical negative. Mr. Hopkins, for example, found
that the English court records do not yield one reference to third degree
methods in the last twenty years. We need not assume that there have
been no instances of its use in Britain, but it surely is not characteristic
of English criminal justice, yet England has a far better record as to
crime repression than we have. If the Third Degree can be justified at
all, it is only under the same conditions that vindicated the Vigilantes of
frontier days; namely, its use in areas and periods where orderly legal
justice cannot be obtained. It is conceivable that, in certain American
cities today, a decay of lawful justice exists which approaches the
anarchy of the frontier. It is possible that effective repression of crim-
inals, especially lesser henchmen of racketeers, can be accomplished in
such localities only through resort to third degree practices. If so, then
each police commissioner who tolerates such methods should publicly
announce what he is doing and why. This would accomplish a quadruple
good: (1) It would direct public attention to the demoralization of our
judges and courts; (2) it would compel the commissioner to prove his
case or reform his ways; (3) it would let the crooks know just what to
expect if seized by a policeman; and (4) it would let the people know
what they must insist upon if they desire civilized justice.

Certainly any permanent or habitual use of the Third Degree is incom-
patible with either science or humanity. The case was well stated by
the late Judge Cuthbert Pound, formerly chief justice of the New York
State Court of Appeals, one of the ablest of American jurists. In re-
versing the conviction of John Barbato, he wrote:

Lawless methods of law enforcement should not be countenanced by our courts,
even though they may seem expedient to the authorities in order to apprehend
the guilty. Whether a guilty man goes free or not is a small matter compared
with the maintenance of principles which still safeguard a person accused of
crime.

Nowhere is there a greater departure from the formal theory of the
dignity and earnestness of the law and its administration than in the
antics of lawyers in criminal courtrooms. There is every type of horse-
play, cunning, ingenuity, and the like, designed to win the case. There
is little regard for the facts and slight interest in seeing that justice is
done. The rules governing the admission and exposition of evidence are
better suited to obscuring the facts than they are to revealing and em-
phasizing them. We shall have more to say about this later in the section
on the jury trial. Further, the wealthy defendant has the same ad-
vantage in the criminal courtroom that he has in the field of civil litiga-
tion. He has the money to hire not only a very clever, but also a very
influential, lawyer whose extra-courtroom connections may be even more

LAW IN ACTION 435

important than his adroitness and eloquence within the courtroom. The
poor man must be content either with the best lawyer he can afford to
hire or with the perfunctory defense put up by the lawyer assigned by
the court to defend him.

The prevalence of what has been called "bargain-counter justice" was
brought out in the Report of the New York State Crime Commission on
the crimes and sentences of prisoners, of which Sam A. Lewisohn was the
chairman. In the year 1931, at least 70 per cent of the convicts received
in state penal institutions in New York had not been convicted in a jury
trial. They had made pleas of guilty to lesser offenses than those for
which they had been indicted, and their pleas had been accepted. There
is often little exact relationship, at present, between the crimes for which
persons are arrested in New York State and those for which they are
convicted. The reason for this is the absurd and savage system of severe
mandatory sentences produced by our hysteria about the crime wave.
Judges with some spark of decency and humanity hesitate to impose the
atrocious sentences made mandatory for a particular crime. Hence, as
the New York Report puts it, they are prone to accept a plea of guilty
for a lesser crime:

It is as if the courts themselves, realizing almost instinctively the essential
injustice inherent in these mandatory sentences turned with relief to any methods,
however clumsy, to avoid imposing such long inflexible terms of punishment.
In so doing they unconsciously often rendered the whole system of prison
sentences absurd and gave to the prisoners and their families a sense of being
able to frustrate or evade any of the laws of punishment and correction.

This system is particularly vicious, in that it gives a special advantage
to the clever and experienced criminal who has already had contact with
our criminal law and knows enough to get an astute lawyer who will
help him to make the best possible bargain with the judge and district
attorney. The Report gives a number of representative cases indicating
the unfairness of the system as it operates today. One man who had
fired shots to kill in the robbery for which he was indicted, admitted that
he already had participated in 48 other robberies. A plea of guilty of
robbery, third degree, was accepted and the man was given an inde-
terminate sentence of from three to six years in a state prison. Another
man, with no previous criminal record, held up a store and got away with
some $600 in cash and jewelry. No shots were fired. He entered a
plea of guilty of robbery, first degree, and was sentenced to state's prison
for from 15 to 30 years with an additional sentence of from 5 to 10
years for the use of a gun. In another case, a man with accomplices
entered a man's home, beat him up so severely that he required major
medical attention for six weeks, and robbed him of his money. The
assailant was indicted for robbery, first degree, assault, first degree, petty
larceny, and receiving stolen goods. A plea of robbery, third degree,
was accepted and he was sentenced to the Elmira Reformatory. In two
years, he would be eligible for release on parole. Another mah with an
armed accomplice held up a leather shop clerk and stole some $200.

436 LAW IN ACTION

He stood trial for robbery in the first degree, was convicted, and sen-
tenced to state prison to from 15 to 30 years.

Absurd discrepancies like these could be multiplied indefinitely. The
Report wisely suggests the logical remedy, namely, that the judge shall
impose automatically the maximum sentence provided by law for the
crime. Then the power of release should be transferred to the Board of
Parole, with authority to act at any time after the convicted person has
served one year in a penal or reformatory institution. The Report em-
phasizes the utter illogicality which prevails today in our system, where
the sentencing judge is allowed to consider only the crime, ignoring the
offender, while the parole board is expected to consider the offender
rather than the crime. This logical contradiction brings confusion and
inefficiency into our system of criminal jurisprudence, from the moment
of arrest until the final discharge of the convict.

The way our conventional criminal jurisprudence deals with insanity
and the mental capacity of the accused is literally a travesty. In most
states it is almost impossible for an expert in medical psychology to
present straightforward and relevant evidence in the courtroom. He
can only answer the questions put to him, and they are adroitly framed
to bring out the points desired by the examining lawyers. He can never
present the well-organized and unified report that he would set forth in
dealing with a case in private practice. The legal test of insanity — that
is, the question whether or not a person can distinguish between right and
wrong and recognize the consequences of his acts — bears no important
relationship to the scientific medical notions of mental disease. Plenty
of psychopathic people have no serious impairment of mental powers but
are quite incapable of normal social conduct in the face of inciting cir-
cumstances. This is especially true of paranoids and those suffering from
compulsion psychoses and neuroses.

Massachusetts was the first commonwealth to eliminate the worst
obstacles to the introduction of medical science in the courtroom. Here
the burlesque and horseplay involved in the legal examination and cross-
Sxamination of psychiatrists have been done away with. The accused
man is thoroughly examined by an accredited psychiatrist from the State
Department of Mental Diseases, and a careful report is drawn up and
available when the trial opens. The doctor functions in the courtroom
as he might when dealing with a private patient. His only incentive is
the ascertainment of truth and he suffers no significant handicap in setting
it forth for the benefit of the court.

In sentencing prisoners, judges follow the wrong-headed principle of
trying to make a punishment fit a crime, and they indulge in the most
irresponsible arbitrariness in imposing sentences for a -given crime. The
writer once made a special study of variations in sentencing for similar
crimes in the same state and in the same era. The grossest discrepancies
were found — among sentences imposed by different judges for the same
crime as well as among sentences imposed by the same judge for identical
crimes. Sound criminal science shows the desirability of varying the

LAW IN ACTION 437

sentence for a given crime, according to the personality of the convict
and the conditions surrounding the crime. There is little evidence, how-
ever, that these considerations weigh at all heavily with sentencing judges.
Far more potent are the reactions they develop toward the defendant
during the trial and the general state of their digestive tract at the
moment of sentencing. Judges also differ widely in the extent to which
they use their opportunity to prescribe punishments other than imprison-
ment. F. J. Gaudet, G. S. Harris, and Charles W. St. John once studied
the sentences imposed during a nine-year period by six judges in one
New Jersey county. The following table shows the results of their
study: 65

PERCENTAGE OF EACH KIND OF SENTENCE GIVEN BY EACH JUDGE

Judge 1 Judged Judge 8 Judged Judged Judged

Imprisonment .35.6% 33.6% 53.3% 57.7% 45.0% 50.0%

Probation 28.5 30.4 20.2 19.5 28.1 32.4

Fined 2.5 2.2 1.6 3.1 1.9 1.9

Suspended 33.4 33.8 24.3 19.7 25.0 15.7

No. of cases 1235 1693 1869 1489 480 676

The Travesty of the Jury Trial

There is hardly a more respected institution in American life, except
for the Christian Church and the Supreme Court, than our customary
jury trial. And probably there is not a greater obstacle to the scientific
determination of fact in legal disputes and criminal cases. Few, if any,
of our legal practices contribute more to the prevalence of miscarriages
of justice. .

In the selection of the panel, a definite number of names are drawn at
random from a collection of slips or cards bearing the names of all the
qualified citizens of the county. In some cases the theory of a choice by
lot has become a legal fiction, and accommodating commissioners of
juries have been known, for a reasonable consideration, to draw the names
of the men desired by either district attorneys or lawyers for the defense.
When a "fixed" panel supplies a jury, the outcome of the trial may be all
but settled before a single witness has been summoned. But even when a
panel is honestly selected, it conforms precisely to the dubious doctrine
that special training is in no way essential to competence in the handling
of public affairs. It is drawn from the very classes from which a mob
might be raised by the Ku Klux Klan.

In the choice of the actual jury from the panel, we can observe a process
that may be called counter-selection. The obviously more intelligent and
abler members of the panel, drawn from the business and professional
classes, are, for the most part, automatically excused from service, leaving
only the farmers, cobblers, barbers, clerks, hodcarriers, and day-laborers.

65 Gaudet, Harris, and St. John, "Individual Differences in the Sentencing Tend-
encies of Judges," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, January-February,
1933, p. 816.

438 LAW IN ACTION

These men are then questioned forthwith as to whether they have read
about or formed any opinion concerning the case. Those who answer in
the affirmative are likewise automatically disqualified. Any honest man
with a modicum of literacy is, in significant cases, compelled to give an
affirmative answer. Thus the choice of jurymen in important trials is
actually limited, for the most part, to the illiterates and the liars.

Naturally, the attorneys for both sides want a jury which will be,
a priori, as favorable as possible to their side. Therefore, they challenge
all jurymen who, because of party affiliation, religious belief, class mem-
bership, or nationality, may possibly be against them. If the defendant
is a prominent Democrat, the district attorney naturally desires a Re-
publican jury; likewise a Catholic defendant calls for a heavy represen-
tation of Methodists and Baptists. With a "Red" on trial, the district
attorney tries to get a jury of bank clerks and stock brokers, while the
counsel for the defense labors to secure venircmen who admire W. Z. Foster
and Earl Browder. The liberal legal arrangements for challenging with-
out cause, and the practically unlimited right of challenging for cause,
make this maneuvering easy. Only an exactly equal balancing of oppor-
tunity, favoritism, knowledge, and wits on the part of the opposing
barristers can prevent it. The jury is thus often "fixed," "hand-picked,"
or composed of the most colorless and feeble-minded of the illiterates and
liars.

The jury, after a few days of excitement or bewilderment in the new
atmosphere, settles down into a state of mental paralysis which makes it
practically impossible for the majority of its members to concentrate
upon the testimony and rulings of the court. The farmer wonders
whether his hens are being fed; the drummer bemoans his lost sales and
"dates." Awakened from time to time from this state of distraction by
the unusual beauty, volubility, resonance, or obscenity of the witnesses
and testimony, the jurymen pounce upon some irrelevant bit of testimony
and forget or overlook the most significant facts divulged by the witnesses.
Thus we have, in a typical jury trial, the testimony of the witnesses and
the rulings of the judge presented to a group of colorless men drawn from
the least intelligent elements in the population who have lapsed into a
mental state which all but paralyzes the operation of their normally
feeble intellects. As Ferdinand Lundberg observes:

The underlying aim of the lawyer in a great majority of cases seems to be to
fill the jury box with a well-balanced aggregation of the feebleminded. Only a
reasonable limitation upon his peremptory challenges keep him short of complete
success.66

66 Harper's, December, 1938, p. 13. For a more favorable view of juries, see the
article "Just How Stupid Are Juries?" ibid., pp. 84 ff. For an able lawyer's account
of his experiences on a jury, see William Seagle, "Confessions of a Juror," Coronet,
March, 1941, pp. 136-138. Probably the most complete and authoritative critique
of the jury trial is Judge Irvin Stalmaster's What Price Jury Trials? Stratford, 1931.
See also, Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind, Brentano, 1930, pp. 170-185,
302-09; and Leon Green, Judge and Jury, Vernon Law Book Co., Kansas City, Mo.,
1930.

LAW IN ACTION 439

The situation as regards the testimony itself is scarcely more satis-
factory. Psychologists, following the pioneer work of Hugo Munsterberg,
have proved time and again that the most honest and intelligent eye-
witnesses, having observed an act in question leisurely and directly, are
unable to testify about it with exactitude or unanimity.

The testimony normally produced in a courtroom is much inferior to
that brought forth in carefully controlled psychological tests. Usually
eye-witnesses are scarce, and they are rarely persons of intelligence. As
likely as not, they are among the "undesirable citizens" of the community,
who would not be believed under oath if they were disgorging from any
other vantage-point than the witness chair. But even these inferior
persons, with their inadequate information, are rarely allowed to testify
in a straightforward fashion. The technical rules of evidence often pre-
vent their being permitted to tell the most pertinent things they know.
On the other hand, counsel may seduce them into making all sorts of
vague insinuations — or even precise statements — about things of which
they know practically nothing.

But even this is not the worst of it. Witnesses are usually as carefully
coached by counsel as prize speakers in a rhetorical contest. Often the
"best" type of witness is one who knows nothing about the case and so
may be coached from the beginning to tell a coherent story. Convictions
or confessions of perjury in all sorts of cases, from the celebrated Mooney
case to the equally notorious one of Sacco and Vanzetti, have demon-
strated the frequency of this building up of "impressive" testimony by
counsel and witness without the slightest factual basis. One of the in-
justices of our criminal procedure is that, in a conviction for perjury, the
witness alone, instead of the witness and counsel together, is punished.
But even accurate testimony by witnesses of highest intelligence and
undisputed veracity would be wasted upon the illiterate, inattentive, dis-
tracted jury.

Hence the outcome is essentially this: a number of individuals of
average or less than average ability, who could not tell the truth if they
wanted to, who usually have little of the truth to tell, who are not allowed
to tell even all of that, and who are frequently instructed to fabricate
voluminously and unblushingly, present this largely worthless, wholly
worthless, or worse than worthless information to twelve men, who are
for the most part unconscious of what is being divulged to them, and would
be incapable of an intelligent interpretation of the information if they
had actually heard it.

In case there is intelligent, pertinent, and damaging testimony and a
few competent jurymen who have slipped by the lawyers unchallenged,
the lawyer whose side seems likely to lose tries to obscure the significance
of the testimony and divert the attention of the jurymen from it. Every
form of inflammatory oratorical appeal is permitted by the rules, and so
is every type of effort to stir the prejudices of the jurymen. The jury
may even be covertly threatened with mob reprisal if it does not render
a certain type of verdict. Particularly in closing appeals is this rhetorical

440 LAW IN ACTION

gaudiness utilized. If the evidence as a whole is strongly unfavorable, the
lawyer is likely to ignore the testimony altogether and appeal solely to
the emotions of the jury. And to the average jury, an emotional appeal
is far more potent than a factual demonstration. F. L. Wellman thus
described the contribution to juridical objectivity and scientific crimi-
nological accuracy made by one J. J. Parker, a venerable and learned
barrister of Mobile, Ala.:

Once, while he was defending a case in the criminal court in Mobile, and during
the? argument of the prosecuting attorney, who was a rather prosy man, Parker
moved his chair around so as to be under the judge's desk and behind the
speaker, so that neither could see him. But he was in full sight of the jury.
After a short time he began to nod his head as though very drowsy, and to tilt
his chair back until it looked as if he would fall backwards. He would then make
a little start and right his chair, and then pretend to go to sleep again, much to
the amusement of the jury. The prosecutor realized that something was going
on to distract the attention of the jury, because their faces were covered with
broad grins in spile of his solemn argument. Finally, Parker lost his balance
and fell over backwards, making a good deal of commotion. The bystanders,
who had been enjoying the scene as much as the jurors, broke into uncontrollable
laughter, which was joined in by the jury, and the prosecutor's argument was
completely destroyed.07

Perhaps the most instructive thing about the modern jury trial is that
neither the district attorney nor the counsel for the defense is vitally
interested in the hard facts. The district attorney wants to convict,
whether the defendant is guilty or not; the counsel for defense wants an
acquittal, whether his client is innocent or not. Moreover, it is the jury
which invites the lavish use of money in hiring expensive counsel to ob-
scure facts and create fiction — that transition in trials which Hobhouse
describes as the substitution of battle by purse for the ancient battle by
person. Before a group of trained experts, the dramatics of high-priced
counsel would have about as much standing as the pulpit gymnastics
of Billy Sunday.

The technical rulings on law are often as ineffective before the jury as
is^the testimony. The average juryman knows little of the law, and
almost invariably misses the significance of the judge's interpretation of
it. Sometimes even when the rulings are simple, explicit, and direct, the
jury brazenly ignores them. In one interesting case, a judge instructed
the jury to bring in a verdict in a certain manner, unless they felt that
they knew more about the law than he did. Astonished when they dis-
regarded his advice, he reminded them of his charge. Whereupon the
foreman responded, "Well, Jedge, I reckon we considered that point, too."
Especially futile are the rulings with respect to the rejection of evidence
that has actually been presented. If a juryman has really been impressed
with the testimony, in not one case out of ten will he be influenced by a
subsequent ruling of the judge that it is irrelevant and must be excluded
from consideration. At the other extreme, as we have seen, the prejudices

67 F. L. Wellman, Gentlemen of the Jury, Macmillan, 1924, p. 153.

LAW IN ACTION 441

of the judge may be so determined and persistent as to override the im-
port of the evidence. If the judge is both adroit and impressive, he may
exert a greater influence over the jury than all the testimony submitted
during the trial.

The burlesque upon science and justice which trial by jury thus presents
is carried from the courtroom to the room where the jury deliberates.
Here it can and often does ignore the instructions of the judge and all the
testimony presented, and its decision is based on the prejudices of the
members. In a notorious murder trial in New Jersey the jury frankly
disregarded all the testimony, knelt in prayer, and then found a unani-
mous verdict for the defendant. The case was unique only in regard to
the frankness of the jury's confession of the method it pursued and the
publicity which that confession received in the press. Even when a jury
is reasonably alert in following the testimony, the desirable results of
such an unusual phenomenon may be destroyed by the presence upon the
panel of a powerful and impressive personality or an unusually stubborn
moron. Innumerable miscarriages of justice have been due to the con-
version of the jury to the point of view of a prejudiced but convincing
orator, or to the presence of a juror who, through bias, bribery, or stupid-
ity has held out against the judgment of his eleven colleagues. The most
elementary psychology makes it clear that even if twelve able men were
on the jury, they could rarely come to a concise, definite, well-reasoned
agreement based upon a study of the same body of facts.

William Seagle suggests that the presence of a dominant personality
on a jury may often aid the cause of justice. He holds that: "The whole
jury system rests upon the theory that in every group of twelve men there
will be at least one who is not a moron." Mr. Seagle's thesis is doubtless
sound when the able juror is a trained lawyer and a good psychologist,
such as Mr. Seagle, but the vigorous figure who sways his fellow jurors is
more likely to be a strong-willed amateur, often bigoted and prejudiced.
In such cases, his influence is likely to be even more mischievous and
prejudicial to justice than the "deliberations" of the eleven "morons."

We have thus the spectacle of a "fixed" or "selected" jury, or one of
colorless liars and illiterates deciding the matter of the corporeal existence,
public reputation, property rights, or personal freedom of a fellowman
upon the basis of prayer, lottery, rhetoric, debate, stubbornness, or intimi-
dation, in ignorance or defiance of legal rulings which they do not under-
stand and of testimony, perhaps dishonest, which they have only imper-
fectly followed, and from an intelligent comprehension of which they
have been diverted by the emotional appeals of counsel.

If one protests against the accuracy of this picture by the allegation
that most verdicts are, nevertheless, sound and that such a result could
scarcely be expected from so grotesque a procedure as we have described,
the first answer would be the query as to how one knows a particular
verdict is a correct one. The majority of our convicted murderers go to
the chair bawling protestations of innocence, while many obviously guilty
ones are freed. There being under our system an opportunity only for

442 LAW IN ACTION

a verdict of guilty or not guilty, by the mathematical laws of chance
verdicts should be right in 50 per cent of all cases. There is no proof
whatsoever that more than half of our jury verdicts are accurate, or that
the majority of those which are sound are such for any other reason than
pure chancfe. An equally satisfactory result might be obtained far less
expensively, and in a more expeditious and dignified manner, simply by
resort to dice or the roulette wheel. The writer would be quite willing
to defend the thesis that, insofar as accuracy and justice are concerned,
the modern jury trial is scarcely superior to the ordeal or trial by battle.
Those who feel convinced of the relatively high accuracy of jury ver-
dicts and believe that the jury trial promotes justice will do well to read
the careful book of Edwin M. Borchard Convicting the Innocent,™ which
presents representative examples in which jury verdicts were completely
overthrown by the facts as later demonstrated. Among these cases are
several in which persons had been convicted of murder only to have the
supposed victim turn up hale and hearty. Professor Borchard has been
a leader among those who believe that the state should make restitution
to those wrongfully convicted of crime.

Suggested Reforms in Legal Practice and
Courtroom Procedure

It is obvious that legal reform is mandatory, if we hope to provide
justice for the mass of Americans. The lawyers have already done much
to wreck American democracy and economic solvency. If they persist
in their policies and methods and these destroy our present system of
society, they will bring ruin on themselves. In totalitarian societies the
legal profession is either abolished or thoroughly subordinated to the
political system. This warning to lawyers to repent and put their house
in order is thus phrased by Mr. Lundberg :

A poetic penalty awaits the legal profession in the event that its clients of the
past combine to abolish the democratic state, either by force or by stealth. For
upon the abolition of the democratic state will surely follow the abolition of the
legal profession, as in Russia,69 or its reduction in status to a very mean level,
as in Germany and Italy.

Essentially the same warning is given by Mr. Jackson:

The law dominates or the sword rules. That is the choice, and examples are
on our doorstep. Weaken the law, temper its honesty of administration, and
the tramp of marching feet grows louder. Strengthen it, make its application
just and curative, and visions of marching hosts grow dim.70

Mr. Jackson suggests a number of sensible reforms, among which
are the following: (1) inform and educate the public on legal problems,
so that they will demand improvement; (2) simplify the law and reduce

68 Yale University Press, 1932.
«• Harpers, April, 1939, p. 526.
70 Jackson, op. cit., p. 347.

LAW IN ACTION 443

its technicalities; (3) insist upon civil service qualifications for legis-
lators; (4) work out a proper division of labor between courts and
administrative commissions and tribunals; (5) secure better legal talent
not only to assist clients but also to come to the aid of judges; (6) remove
the judiciary from politics, so far as is possible; and (7) improve the
content and standards of legal education.

Professor Rodell does not believe that any such ameliorative reform
will turn the trick. He contends that we must get rid of The Law and
lawyers, bag and baggage, and adopt common-sense and direct methods
of handling social relations in our urban-industrial age :

What is to be done about the fact that we are all slaves to the hocus-pocus of
The Law — and to those who practice the hocus-pocus, the lawyers?

There is only one answer. The answer is to get rid of the lawyers and throw
the Law with a capital L out of pur system of laws. It is to do away entirely
with both the magicians and their magic and run our civilization according to
practical and comprehensible rules, dedicated to non-legal justice, to common-or-
garden fairness that the ordinary man can understand, in the regulation of human
affairs.

It is not an easy nor a quick solution. It would take time and foresight and
planning. But neither can it have been easy to get rid of the medicine men in
tribal days. Nor to break the strangle-hold of the priests in the Middle Ages.
Nor to overthrow feudalism when feudalism was the universal form of govern-
ment. . . .

A mining engineer could handle a dispute centering about the value of a coal
mine much more intelligently and therefore more fairly than any judge, untrained
in engineering, can handle it. A doctor could handle a dispute involving a physi-
cal injury much more intelligently and therefore more fairly than any judge,
untrained in medicine, can handle it. A retail merchant could handle a business
dispute between two other retail merchants much more intelligently and there-
fore more fairly than any judge can handle it. A man trained in tax adminis-
tration could have handled Senior v. Braden much more intelligently and there-
fore more fairly than the Supreme Court handled it. In short, even discounting
for the moment the encumbrances of legal doctrine that obstruct the straight-
thinking processes of every judge, the average judge is sadly unequipped to deal
intelligently with most of the problems that come before him. . . . Why should
we keep on sacrificing both justice and common sense on the altar of legal prin-
ciples? Why not get rid of the lawyers and their Law? . . . Why not let the
people really involved in any squabble tell, and try to prove to the satisfaction
of the decision-makers, their own lies? Commissions have often found it far
easier to discover the true facts behind any dispute by dispensing with the
lawyers' rules; arbitrators have found it easier still by dispensing with the
lawyers. . . .

If only the average man could be led to see and know the cold truth about
the lawyers and their Law. With the ignorance would ^go the fear. With the
fear would go the respect. Then indeed — and doubtless in orderly fashion too —
it would be: — Woe unto you, lawyers! 71

Even if Professor Rodell be right in his drastic proposal, it is obvious
that, short of revolution, it will be a long time before his plan can be
realized.

The most drastic proposal for immediate reform calls for a socialization

71 Rodell, op. cit.y pp. 249, 253-255, 269-270, 274. Reprinted by permission

444 LAW IN ACTION

of legal practice. The lawyers representing both the prosecution and the
defendant would be paid by the state. It is held that the state provides
hospitals, even if it does not make the diseases. But the state makes the
laws, and hence it should assume responsibility for their adjudication.
This reform is recommended by Mr. Gisnet:

Bearing in mind that it is the poor alone who suffer most grievously from the
denial of justice which prevails in our system ; that such denial of justice to the
poor is caused by long and undue delay in court proceedings, by costs and dis-
bursements and by the expensiveness of counsel which the poor can't afford; and
also that the cry is often raised that the poor are despoiled by unscrupulous
lawyers, the obvious remedy seems to be socialization of the practice of law, so
as to bring the processes of the administration of justice within easy reach of
every citizen, no matter how poor arid humble.

This could be accomplished by the adoption of the following measures:

First: By the abolition of all legal costs and disbursements in all courts and
in all classes of cases or actions for all parties, including expenses of appeals to
higher courts.

Second: By the creation of the office of a Public Defender as a part of the
administration of justice in the criminal courts for the free defense by the state
of all persons charged with misdemeanors or crimes, except such persons who
would be able and might want to employ private counsel.

Third: By the creation of Legal Aid Offices as a part of the administration of
justice in the Civil Courts to be attached to the various courts and to furnish
counsel free of charge to represent parties, plaintiff or defendant, in all litigated
actions.72

The notion of providing a public defender is highly recommended by
many interested in the reform of our legal procedure.73 The idea under-
lying is summarized by Charles Mishkin in an article in the Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology:

It is axiomatic that one of the primary duties of the government is to admin-
ister justice. Rich and poor should be on an equal plane when before the bar
of justice; but in practice are they equal? The rich man has his corps of brilliant
attorneys and sufficient funds to employ investigators to discover witnesses,
gather evidence, and prepare an adequate defense on his behalf. The poor man,
on the other hand, is helpless, without funds, often not understanding what the
proceedings are all about, and is forced to rely for his protection upon an attorney
wlio has been assigned to represent him without "compensation. Honest and well
meaning though the attorney may be, he is handicapped by lack of funds to con-
duct an investigation to ascertain the facts, and often without experience in
criminal matters. Thus handicapped, he is forced to contend against the un-
limited power and resources and prestige possessed by the public prosecutor's
office. Truly this is a spectacle of the state bringing all its power and wealth
to bear against a weak and powerless accused [person], who may in fact be
innocent of the charge brought against him. . . .

The state should be just as diligent in attempting to prove the man innocent
as it is in attempting to prove him guilty. Still it maintains the powerful offices
of public prosecutor to represent the prosecution, and leaves the indigent accused
to present his defense as best he may. . . . The truth is obvious that if it is the
primary function of the State to seek the truth in a criminal prosecution, then
that function is not fully performed unless, side by side with the office of public

72 Gisnet, op. cit., pp. 145-146.

73 Cf. Smith, Justice and the Poor, Chap. XV.

LAW IN ACTION 445

prosecutor to prosecute the charges, there exists also, as an arm of the state, the
office of public defender to defend against the charges. This, in brief, is the
basis for the public defender idea.74

The present system of assigning counsel is highly defective: Assigned
attorneys are often young, inexperienced; and incompetent. A class of
undesirable lawyers hover about the courtrooms, eager for assignment,
with the sole purpose of getting as much as they can from the accused
and his relatives, and then lying down on the job.75 Such conditions lead
the more competent, and ethical attorneys, who might otherwise accept
defense assignments, to avoid the responsibility.

The institution of the public defender, suggested as a remedy for this
situation, is not new.76 The office was created in Spain five centuries ago.
Other countries which adopted it included Hungary, Norway, and Argen-
tina. The latter country has developed the idea and practice to a high
degree. There is a strong movement in England working for the institu-
tion of this office. The plan has been established in a preliminary way in
California, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Nebraska and in several cities
— Portland (Oregon) , Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Indianapolis.
The advantages from the standpoint of both justice and economy are the
following: (1) clearly guilty offenders are urged to plead guilty, thus
saving unnecessary trials; (2) adequate defense is provided for all good
cases; (3) jury trial is often waived; (4) cases are tried promptly when
reached on the calendar; (5) cases are tried more expertly and expedi-
tiously; (6) great economies result from the foregoing; (7) trial judges
may trust the public defender in advice as to sentencing; (8) the usual
chicanery of criminal trials has no logical basis for existence; and (9)
there is a great reduction in the probability that a poor and innocent
defendant will be "railroaded." 77

While keenly alert to the evils of courtroom procedure in legal practice,
Adolph A. Berle has some doubts about the practicability of the socializa-
tion of the legal profession. He says that it is almost a contradiction in
terms: "If property is not socialized, it is difficult to demand that legal
services for the settlement of questions concerned with property be social-
ized." 78 But he is extremely appreciative of the work done by volunteer
lawyers in the effort to improve justice for the poor. He says that this
has probably contributed more than any other single force to the mainte-
nance of the integrity and stability of the bar.

The legal aid societies which have sprung up in many of our cities have
also made a very important contribution to the improvement of legal prac-
tice. The legal aid movement has given poor defendants competent and
free advice. Most important of all, it has saved them from expensive

74Loc. cit., November, 1931, pp. 495-496. See also Samuel Rubin, "The Public
Defender as an Aid to Criminal Justice," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology ,
November, 1927.

75 See above, pp. 430-431.

76 Of. Smith, op. cit., pp. 115 ff.

77 Cf. Mishkin, loc. cit., pp. 504-505.

78 For contrary opinions, see Gisnet, op. cit.; and Rodell; op. cit.

446 LAW IN ACTION

and often fruitless litigation. The New York City Legal Aid Society
obtains pacific settlements in 9 out of 10 cases it handles. The move-
ment now has a definite national basis in the National Association of
Legal Aid Organizations, which came into being in 1923. John Mac-
Arthur Maguire of Harvard University thus summarizes the important
contributions which we may expect from the legal aid movement:

The significance of the wide legal aid development in modern civilization is
very great. It has progressively bettered the condition of the poor, increased
their understanding of law and willingness to conduct themselves lawfully and
corrected unwise revolutionary inclinations. Fair minded legal aid lawyers have
again and again changed for the better the attitude of employers to employees.
Efficient legal aid unquestionably increases the public prestige of bar and bench
alike. The movement gives considerable opportunity for training young lawyers,
sometimes even during the course of their studies. It will combat more and more
effectively such abuses as extortionate contingent fee arrangements. Finally,
one of its most important possibilities, already amply manifested in the United
States, is furtherance of wise law reform by recommendations based upon exceed-
ingly broad observation of the practical results of existing substantive and
procedural rules. Legal aid may well be one of the decisive factors in successful
social adjustment.79

It is especially desirable that the third degree evil should be curbed.
Some sane observations on this subject are contained in an article
"Remedies for the Third Degree/' in the Atlantic Monthly by Zechariah
Chafee, Jr.80 Professor Chafee makes it clear at the start that these law-
less practices are not necessary to convict criminals. The experience of
England, where police inquisition is strictly forbidden, and of Boston,
Philadelphia and Cincinnati, which do not employ the third degree fre-
quently, prove definitely that satisfactory results can be obtained without
any brutal and illegal methods. The brutality of the police comes chiefly
between arrest and the arraignment of the accused. After the magistrate
commits the man to jail or admits him to bail, the police have little oppor-
tunity to get in any "rough stuff." Therefore, attention must be concen-
trated on cutting down the time between arrest and arraignment and on
giving proper publicity to what goes on in this interval.

•Professor Chafee does not believe we need any more laws. The ac-
cused has plenty of formal legal protection already. He is constitution-
ally protected in the matter of testifying against himself. Confessions
obtained by coercion are declared void by law. Policemen may be pun-
ished as criminals if found guilty of violent third degree methods.
Illinois, California, and Washington have especially stringent laws against
police brutality, but the third degree was found to be flourishing in Chi-
cago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The difficulty arises from the fact that
it is hard to enforce these laws. The district attorney is frequently "in
cahoots" with the police and is not likely to be enthusiastic about prose-

70 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 9, p. 324. For the best
discussion of the origins of legal aid societies, see Smith, op. cit., Part III.
so November, 1931, pp. 621-630.

LAW IN ACTION 447

cuting his own collaborators. In the courtroom, the judge and jury are
more likely to believe the policeman than the defendant.

Reform, says Professor Chafee, must be gradual. Changes so drastic
as to disrupt our present police system would be temporarily disastrous.
Professor Chafee suggests the following specific reforms: (1) measures
should be taken to promote more prompt production of the accused
person before a magistrate after arrest. (2) Compulsory records of the
time of arrest and of arraignment before the magistrate should be kept.
(3) Improvement should be made in the quality of the police. If the
public understands that prevalence of third degree methods is proof of
inferior police service, the police will not be long in abandoning this
stigmatized practice. (4) A public authority should be created, inde-
pendent and fearless, which can hear complaints of the third degree and
make prompt and effective investigation of the facts. The proposed
public defender might exercise this function. (5) Relentless publicity
should be given to revealed abuses: "The third degree cannot thrive
under publicity. The police need and desire the approval of their com-
munity; and few communities can be proud of men who habitually use
the rubber hose."

The evils connected with jury trial should be ended by the creation of
commissions of experts, trained in psychology, criminalistics, criminal
law, and sociology, who would examine the evidence and decide upon
guilt. Until jury trial can be abolished, a step in the right direction
would be the elimination of the power of the judge to impose a definite
time sentence.

Effective action must be taken against the judicial oligarchies in the
country. Such measures would involve the checking of the judicial usur-
pation of legislative functions and the termination of arbitrariness and
favoritism in the every day conduct of the judge in the courtroom. Gold-
berg and Levenson have made certain suggestions along this line:

1. The recall of judges and judicial decisions should be established throughout
the country. . . .

2. Until the recall of judges and judicial decisions shall become effective, we
advocate the impeachment of any judge who deliberately misinterprets a statute
or law, and that the process of impeachment be made simpler.

3. A constitutional amendment depriving the courts of the power to declare
laws unconstitutional should be adopted.

4. The establishment of legislative commissions to hear complaints against
judges for the purpose of promptly bringing to the attention of the impeaching
authorities all meritorious charges.

The difficulty of bringing and prosecuting charges against judges is well known.
Lawyers, no matter how prominent they may be, hesitate to proceed against
judges before whom they must appear. This condition has made it practically
impossible for the ordinary citizen to obtain a fair and impartial hearing against
a judge who has acted lawlessly. A legislative commission composed of laymen
would be the proper body with whom such charges should be lodged. The mere
establishment of such a governmental organ would tend to deter judges from
acting lawlessly.

We know that it is difficult to strip the ermine from judicial shoulders, but
the worshipful attitude of the people towards the courts must be changed through

448 LAW IN ACTION

education. A sign of hope is the vague feeling of unrest — the general awakening
to the dangers of an unrestrained judicial oligarchy .81

Less drastic and more immediately practicable suggestions revolve
around taking the sentencing power away from judges. After an accused
person is found guilty the judge would remand him to the proper authori-
ties for study and treatment. This would not necessarily eliminate judi-
cial savagery and arbitrariness in the courtroom but it would lessen the
consequences of such behavior. Moreover, it would also terminate the
abuses connected with both undue severity and grotesque variations in
the use of the sentencing power. Such proposals as these have the sup-
port of many respectable and relatively conservative persons. Alfred E.
Smith once made such a suggestion while governor of the State of New
York.

Above all, we need a broader and more humane view of the law. This
point has been well emphasized by Raymond Moley:

What is wanted, really, is a doctor of human relations, a new kind of lawyer.
As Judge Seabury has recently pointed out, we need in the criminal courts some-
thing closely akin to what has been developed in the medical profession in pro-
visions for public clinics where science and public service develop side by side;
where able young lawyers may learn and apply a wider range of wisdom than
they find in their law books, and where the victims of a complex and exacting
social order may find enlisted in their service genuinely interested and adequately
endowed friends in court.82

The evils of corporation law practice can best be handled by legislation
curbing criminality and borderline criminality in corporate practice. If
the law is broad and clear enough on such matters, it will be difficult for
the most astute corporation lawyers to evade it. A step in the right
direction was taken when the Federal Securities Act was passed in 1933,
and when the Securities and Exchange Commission was created. Other
important reform legislation in this field has followed, such as the Securi-
ties and Exchange Act of 1934, the Public Utility Holding Company Act
of 1935, the Chandler Corporate Reorganization Act of 1938, the Rail-
noad Reorganization Act of 1940, and the like.

Corporate practice could further be improved, in part, by a constitu-
tional amendment specifying that no corporation can qualify as a "per-
son" under the wording and intent of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amend-
ments. This would do away with the "due process" nuisance in protect-
ing lawless and anti-social corporations and in affording the Supreme
Court almost unlimited freedom in setting aside legislation which conflicts
with the prejudices of a majority on the bench. It would also be desirable
to deprive the Court of its right to set aside federal laws, but its right to
void state laws should be continued, in the case of state legislation which
clearly violates the federal Constitution. But it should not have the

81 Goldberg and Levenson, op. cit., pp. 240-242.

82 The New York Times, May 3, 1931.

LAW IN ACTION 449

right to invalidate state statutes, on the ground that they interfere with
corporations as "persons."

During the last decade there has been considerable progress, some of
which has already been noted, both in the way of improving the law and
in correcting the social and economic conditions which encouraged abuses
of the law. Certain trends reveal progress in legal concepts and prac-
tices. The new Federal Practice Act incorporates the fruits of many
years of professorial research and legal experience. The American Law
Institute is promulgating a modern code of evidence, drawn up by the
two outstanding American authorities on the subject. An office under the
supervision of the Supreme Court is charged with the duty of making a
constant survey of the practical operations of the courts and recommend-
ing needed changes in procedure. Certain progressive states, like New
York, have law revision commissions which make yearly reports to the
legislatures recommending the revision of both substantive and statutory
law which has become archaic or otherwise unjust and unworkable.

The social and economic reforms of the New Deal have eliminated or
curbed many of the abuses of corporation law. The Supreme Court
battle ultimately resulted in a liberal court. The Sutherlands and Mc-
Reynolds have been replaced by the Blacks and Douglases. This has
made it more difficult to use the Constitution as an instrument of oppres-
sion and exploitation and as an agency to slaughter progressive legislation.
Liberal lawyers, like Charles E. Clark, Jerome Frank, and Leon Green,
are coming to share in the legal prestige once monopolized by the Cra-
vaths and the Strawns. What our entry into the second World War
may do to reverse these laudable trends is, of course, another matter.

That the danger of reaction and intolerance is very great was made
evident by the American Civil Liberties Union in their brochure "The
Bill of Rights in War," issued on June 27, 1942, reviewing the status of
civil liberties during the previous year. It was pointed out how even
liberal judges had lost their former regard for the right of minorities
and how the Supreme Court had refused to review cases in which obvious
injustices had been done and constitutional rights had been violated.
Especially menacing was a decision by the Court upholding the right of
cities to require licenses for the distribution of non-commercial literature.
Professor Raymond Moley warned of the menace in an able editorial
in News-Week, June 29, 1942.

Great as is the need for legal reform, we cannot reasonably hope for
very speedy action. The evils of "The Law" are nothing new. Consid-
erably over a hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his lawyer
friend, Joseph Cabell, completely in the spirit of Fred Rodell:

I should apologize, perhaps, for the style of this bill. I dislike the verbose and
intricate style of the English statutes. . . . You, however, can easily correct
this bill to the taste of my brother lawyers, by making ever> other word a "said"
or "aforesaid," and saying everything over three or four times, so that nobody
but we of the craft can untwist the diction, and find out what it means; and that,
too, not so plainly but that we may conscientiously divide one-half on each side.83

83 Cited in S. K. Padover, Jefferson, Harcourt, Brace, 1942, p. 24.

PART IV

Communication and the Formation of
Public Opinion

CHAPTER XIII
Communication in Contemporary Society

Language as the Fundamental Medium of
Communication

The Origins of Language. One of the greatest differences between
man and his fellow primates is man's ability to use language and symbols.
Apes can use tools; they can even invent simple ones. But man through
language can make tool-using continuous and hence cumulative in nature.
Human culture may be regarded as derived, in the last analysis, from the
use of tools and symbols. Therefore we may fairly say that the essence
of human culture is the spoken word and symbolic communication.

Our culture has developed beyond that of other primates largely because
of our mastery of speech. This implies that evolution into a human state
was intimately connected with the function of formal communication.
The late G. Elliot Smith says that:

It seems a legitimate inference from the facts to assume that the acquisition
of the power of communicating ideas and the fruits of experience from one indi-
vidual to another by means of articulate speech may have been one of the factors,
if not the fundamental factor, in converting an ape into a human being.1

But speech, like intelligence, is not a human monopoly. Animals have
means of communicating with each other. The dog barks, the cow moos,
monkeys chatter, the cat has a diapason of sounds. Animals can thus
express well-defined emotions, but as C. K. Ogden says, we must not
assume that animals have the ability to name anything specific. An
animal makes a sound to express a need or desire, or merely to spend
surplus energy. A naming cry is an interpretive sound. "Plainly nam-
ing cannot arise until the animal can respond to situations not merely as
eliciting this or that activity, but as possessing this or that character." 2

Let us pursue the distinction a little farther. All speech, whether ani-
mal or human, involves expression. Man's speech involves more than
that — it embraces what Ogden calls "objective reference" (interpreta-
tion). This objective reference is man's peculiar achievement. How did
such an all-important achievement come about?

Man's higher or differentiated use of speech developed out of the ani-
mal's lower or undifferentiated vocal expressions. Even among animal
cries there is some sort of objective reference. Before infants can speak,

1 Quoted by C. K. Ogden, The Meaning of Psychology, Harper, 1926, p. 149.

2 Ibid., p. 150.

450

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 451

they have a wide variety of vocal expressions, such as a call for food, or
a cry of discomfort. An infant can communicate long before he utters
a definable word. Animals can do much the same. Their cry is a call
to action. It expresses an emotion "long before any explicit reflection
upon, or recognition of, the situation can have arisen. We must remem-
ber in considering any stage of language, that its use in reflection, as an
instrument of thought, is a kind of diversion of it from its original uses." 3
The danger cries and other social utterances of animals may be regarded
as crude names. What they name is not any specific feature of a situa-
tion but the whole situation. A similar phenomenon meets us in human
speech if we go back as far as we can into the origin of any given
language.

When man had arrived at the stage of forming sentences, he too prob-
ably first expressed a situation as a whole rather than in its component
parts. He probably expressed himself as the Eskimo does in saying
"sinikatachpok," rather than the English way of putting it: "He is ill
from having slept too much." In the beginning, language probably cre-
ated some of its "ideas" or "words" by imitating natural sounds, such as
"cuckoo," "pee-wit," "bang," "crash," "plop," "zip." This practice of
imitating natural sounds is called "onomatopoeia."

A rival to the onomatopoeic theory of the origin of language holds that
movements of hands and feet were associated with cries which, within the
family or community, became standardized in time. In other words, as
Sir J, G. Frazer points out, all members of a community agreed to make
the same sounds when, for instance, looking at the sun, peering into a dark
place, or kicking an object. After a while the sound alone would suggest
the various actions. This is called the "gesture theory." Probably,
language actually arose both from imitation of natural sounds and from
gesticular meanings put into words.

Some recent and scientific philologists have abandoned any search for
the actual origin of language. The late Edward Sapir, the ablest student
of language that this country has produced, summarizes the contempo-
rary point of view:

About all that can be said at present is that while speech as a finished organiza-
tion is a distinctly human achievement, its roots probably lie in the power of the
higher apes to solve specific problems by abstracting general, forms or schemata
from the details of given situations ; that the habit of interpreting certain selected
elements in a situation as signs of a desired total one gradually led in early man
to a dim feeling for symbolism; and that in the long run and for reasons which
can hardly be guessed at the elements of experience which were most often
interpreted in a symbolic sense came to be the largely useless or supplementary
vocal behavior that must have often attended significant action. According to
this point of view language is not so much directly developed out of vocal expres-
sion as it is an actualization in terms of vocal expression of the tendency to master
reality, not by direct and ad hoc handling of its elements but by the reduction
of experience to familiar forms.4

s Ibid., p. 152.

4 Article, "Language," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. IX, p. 159.

452 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

It is not difficult to see how concrete things and events got their names.
It is much more difficult to imagine how abstractions — good, bad, true,
for instance — arose. Probably abstractions began as concrete words and
eventually lost their concreteness. Latin anima (soul) is connected with
Sanskrit aniti (breathes) and with Sanskrit anilas (wind). The Latin
word itself must originally have meant breath. Once the conception of a
"spirit" appeared, its presence was located in the body, and it was asso-
ciated with breathing. In time the word lost its connection with the act
of breathing and referred merely to the spirit that was supposed to control
the breathing.

Probably language originated in many places at different times. Our
earliest record of language comes from the valleys of the Nile and
Euphrates. But these examples date from — comparatively — yesterday,
when we remember that man has — crudely in the beginning — conversed
for probably a half-million years. Sumerian, spoken about 5,000 years
ago in southern Mesopotamia, is one of the earliest languages we know.
Nothing, however, would justify our calling the Sumerian dialect a primi-
tive language, in the sense that it resembled the language spoken by pre-
historic types like Heidelberg man, the Neanderthal man, or even the
Cro-Magnon peoples.

Little light is thrown on the problem by the languages of existing
aborigines. From them we mainly learn that primitive culture is often
accompanied by extremely complicated languages. For instance, the
language of the Eskimo is, to a person acquainted with Germanic or
Romance languages, one of almost insurmountable difficulties. This will
suffice to upset a common notion that primitive man has a very limited
vocabulary and a language of simple structure. Such may have been
true of the Neanderthal man, but it is not true of existing savages. What-
ever the origin of language, there can be no doubt of the vast importance
of its appearance and development for the human race:

Language became the chief vehicle for the transmission and preservation of
culture, as well as the most characteristic aspect of culture. Long before written
language was invented, oral tradition preserved and handed down from generation
to generation the discoveries, the inventions, and the social heritage of the past.
Language provided man with a boon without price, the means of storing ex-
ternally to any particular nervous system, records of experience having social
values to the group. External storage of individual experience in language sym-
bols is a process entirely unknown to any form of life other than man. The
importance of this process seems beyond calculation. It reaches its highest
development in the alphabet.5

Civilization is a verbal complex. This fact, more than any other,
separates our culture from the lower forms of primate life. If our lan-
guage and its literary products were suddenly to be taken away, we would
sink to the cultural level of savages of the cave-dwelling period. We
would have no greater cultural or institutional equipment than Homo

5 F. S. Chapin, Cultural Change, Appleton-Century, 1928, p. 40.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 453

sapiens possessed when he first appeared in Europe some thirty thousand
years or more ago.

The question arises: Do all our languages go back to a common ances-
tor? The case for such linguistic monogenesis has been argued by a
brilliant Italian scholar, Trombetti, but has received little support from
others. This question, like many others involving the origins of man,
cannot yet be answered decisively.

The Origins of the Alphabet and a Written Language. The origins of
writing can be linked with the pictograms on the implements and cave
walls of the Paleolithic era. However, before the picture signs could be
regarded as a written language, they had to pass through three well-
defined stages.

First, the pictures had to become "conventionalized," so that they
always had the same appearance and represented the same object. Next,
they had to become the symbols of abstract conceptions. Finally, the
conventionalized symbols had to pass into a stage where they described an
abstract concept and the sound of the human voice representing that
concept.

The last stage, as may be expected, is the most difficult to attain. It is
called "sound writing," and in its most elementary form each symbol
represents ah entire word. Some languages, like the Chinese, have gone
little beyond this stage. Normally, a written language goes farther than
the Chinese, each symbol representing not the object but the sound of the
word referring to the object. Then the various sounds of the human
voice are analyzed and each is represented by a separate symbol or letter;
this constitutes an alphabet.

Around 3000 B.C. the Egyptians had taken an important step in devel-
oping an alphabet by using 24 hieroglyphic signs to indicate 24 con-
sonantal sounds. But they continued to use many additional symbols
for words and syllables, and therefore failed to develop a strictly phonetic
alphabet. A certain Semite of the nineteenth century B.C., perhaps a
Phoenician from Byblos, seems to have invented a true alphabet based
on Egyptian antecedents. His alphabet is used in inscriptions recently
found in southern Palestine. Other inscriptions recently discovered at
Rasesh Shamra near Latakihey in ancient Ugarit (in Syria) are written
in an alphabetic cuneiform script of a northern Semitic dialect. Our
earliest inscription in a fully developed Phoenician alphabet is the epitaph
of Ahiram, king of Byblos, who lived about 1250 B.C. It contains 21
letters, all consonants. The Greeks improved the Phoenician alphabet
by using some of its signs to indicate vowels. This Greek alphabet, with
some modifications, was spread by the Romans to western Europe and by
the Byzantines to eastern Europe.

Writing was probably invented in many other places — Anatolia, Crete,
Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, and Central America. There were, how-
ever, only three great systems of ideographs or picture-forms: (1) the
Sumerian or Babylonian cuneiform, which died out about the beginning
of the Christian Era; (2) the Chinese, with its branches in Korea and

454 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

Japan; and (3) the Egyptian, from which our alphabet was originally
derived.

When man learned to write he also made writing materials. The
Babylonians wrote on clay tablets and stone walls, which, although
durable, were awkward to handle. The Egyptians solved the problem
by using the membrane of the papyrus reed, thin strips which they pasted
together at right angles. On papyrus (whence our word "paper") they
wrote with an ink made of water, vegetable gum, and soot.

Papyrus was so widely known that it probably suggested to the
Chinese, around 200 B.C., the idea of making, at less cost, a form of
paper from the pulp of the mulberry tree. Peoples who had no papyrus
wrote on parchment made from animal skins. The Arabs, about A.D.
750, brought to Spain a paper made from cotton fiber. Five centuries
later flax was substituted for cotton and modern linen paper came into
use. Rag paper was fairly common in western Europe by the middle
of the fourteenth century.

The first pens were pieces of reed sharpened and pointed by hand.
They were superseded by the quill, and later by the modern steel pen.
The first ink was made by thickening water with vegetable gums and
then mixing this with soot obtained from blackened pots. Later, it was
made from various dyes.

The invention of writing and a system of keeping records have had a
greater influence on man's intellectual development than any other
achievement, with the exception of speech. Writing made it possible
permanently to transmit man's ideas, traditions, and mythology. Profes-
sor Breasted has stated the importance of this step in the evolution of
civilization, which we may credit to the Egyptians: "The invention of
writing and of a convenient system of records on paper has had a greater
influence in uplifting the human race than any other intellectual achieve-
ment in the career of man. It was more important than all the battles
ever fought and all the constitutions ever devised."

The great contributions of writing have been accompanied by certain
evils. Although it has enabled us to transmit culture from age to age,
it has at the same time kept alive outworn notions and reprehensible be-
liefs, whose pernicious influences might otherwise never have reached suc-
ceeding generations with any such completeness and force.

Social and Intellectual Problems of Language. In the western world,
the accidents of history have given unusual importance to Semitic lan-
guages, especially Arabic, and to Latin, French, and English. The
Muslims of the Middle Ages were the great pioneers and civilizers of the
medieval period, and they spread the Arabic language from India to
Spain. Medieval Latin was the language of culture in western Christen-
dom during the Middle Ages. French has been the language of diplomacy
and polite society in Europe in modern times. With the growth of the
British Empire and its expansion in the Old and New Worlds, the English
language has been widely disseminated over the face of the earth.

One of the greatest conceivable additions to better communication and

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 455

understanding, especially in this era, would be a universal language which
could be understood by all literate persons. Medieval Latin might have
grown into such a language had it not been suppressed by the Humanists
of early modern times in favor of the florid and rhetorical classical Latin.
The late Louis J. Pactow labored strenuously in favor of reviving
medieval Latin as a world language. This would hardly be feasible be-
cause many of the objects and most of the experiences of our day were
little known, or unknown, in the Middle Ages. There has, however, been
some success in promulgating Esperanto as a world language. A univer-
sal language would not only be a great convenience, but it might also
contribute much to a growth of international understanding and goodwill.

Many illusions have developed with respect to the relation of language
and race. It has been widely held that language is a test of race and that
there is a definite identity between a given race and a given language or
a type of language. It was this illusion that gave rise to the Aryan
Myth. According to this, there was a primordial Aryan race which
fathered the family of Aryan languages. We now know that there was
never an Aryan race and the so-called Aryan languages were brought
into Europe by peoples unrelated racially to the blond Nordics, who are
customarily regarded as the typical Aryans in a racial sense. There was
some definite connection between race and language in very early days,
before race mixture had advanced very far. But during historic times
the same language has been spoken by many races, while a single race
in a physical sense may speak many languages and even more dialects.
There is no direct relationship whatever between the physical fact of race
and the cultural phenomenon of language.

Language has been held by some philosophers to be a sign of cultural
superiority. For example, Johann Gottlieb Fichte held that the German
language proves the Prussians a superior people. While a high culture
could hardly express itself through a rudimentary primitive language,
there is no necessary relationship between cultural superiority and lan-
guage, on roughly the same level of development. Certain languages lend
themselves better than others to a more facile and melodious expression in
one type or another of literary effort; but a high culture may find expres-
sion in a relatively rudimentary form of language. For instance, there
have never been any higher expressions of human sentiment than the
sayings of Confucius, which had to be set down in the relatively elemen-
tary monosyllabic Chinese language.

For a long time the absence of a universal language has been deplored.
But recently it has been pointed out that most persons who speak a given
language do not know the real meaning of many of its words. The mean-
ing of many words may literally be quite different to one person from
what it may be to another, according to his upbringing and experience.
This does not refer primarily to the vocabulary limitations of the masses,
which are very striking, but to the ignorance of the meaning of words
which are known in a formal sense to the user. It also has reference to
pure fictions which are created through the unmeaningful use of words.

456 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

In short, persons using the same language all too often talk and write
without actually communicating.

While this important consideration has been popularized only in
recent years, the whole notion was clearly understood by Francis Bacon
at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The obstructions to thought
growing out of linguistic difficulties and inadequacies constituted what
Bacon called "The Idol of the Marketplace." As Bacon pointed out,
language, particularly rhetorical language, leads to the weakness of sub-
stituting the well-said for the well-thought, encumbers the mind with con-
centration on verbal problems, and creates the illusion that words always
correspond to things. Words are very imperfect vehicles for the expres-
sion of ideas. Even if one is well informed and exact in his own expres-
sion of ideas, it is always difficult to transmit the same meaning to others.
Again, many people, particularly orators, are so entranced by the music
of their words that they become relatively indifferent to the thought
content. As Bacon summarizes the matter:

There are also idols formed by the reciprocal intercourse and society of man
with man, which we call idols of the market, from the commerce and association
of men with each other; for men converse by means of language, but words are
formed at the will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt
formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. Nor can the definitions
and explanations with which learned men are wont to guard and protect them-
selves in some instances afford a complete remedy — words still manifestly force
the understanding, throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain
and innumerable controversies and fallacies.

Fred C. Kelly, commenting on a recent book of Professor S. I. Kaya-
kawa on Language in Action, amplifies this same important point in
contemporary setting:

Spoken words are merely noises people make and written words only symbols
for those noises. At best, such noises and symbols do not tell all. A man may
look at a sunset and make the noise "wonderful" or "glorious," but the noise or
word he uses cannot tell all he feels. It would take a long time and millions
of words to tell all about even so simple an article as an ordinary pencil. For all
dbout it would have to include a microscopic and sub-microscopic description.
And a word never means the same thing twice, for the meaning varies according
to context. An orange is not this orange; nor is the orange you saw yesterday
quite the same orange today. We think we know the meaning of the word
"love," but the love of a man for this girl cannot be the same as the love of
another man for that girl.

Much more than a word is needed to tell all. Yet we often permit ourselves
to be directed into forming an opinion on a highly complicated situation without
examination of facts, with nothing more than a word or two to guide us. When
a piece of proposed legislation for reorganizing government departments wtis
pending in Congress, a Chicago newspaper invariably referred to it as the "dic-
tator bill." Whether the legislation would have worked for good or evil is beside
the point. "Dictator bill" was not a complete, unbiased description of the pro-
posal. The word "dictator" is not a dictator. But many readers behaved as if
the word and the thing were identical.6

6 "Do Words Scare Us?" Saturday Review of Literature, November 22, 1941, p. 11.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 457

The need for an understanding use of language has given rise in recent
years to what is known as semantics, or a real science of communication.
Such books as Count Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity, C. K. Ogden
and I. A. Richard's The Meaning of Meaning, and S. I. Kayakawa's
Language in Action are representative works in this field. But it re-
mained for Stuart Chase to popularize the matter in his article on "The
Tyranny of Words" in Harper's,7 and, soon afterwards, in a book of the
same title.

Few words have any universal and precise meaning. Even when a
person uses a word in an accurate and meaningful way to himself, it
rarely means the same thing to another person and never will mean the
same thing to all persons. We recognize our blank ignorance or confusion
when we do not understand a foreign language, but most of us delude
ourselves into imagining we can all understand our own language. As
Chase puts it:

When a Russian speaks to an Englishman unacquainted with Slavic, nothing
comes through. But the Britisher shrugs his shoulders and both comprehend
that communication is nil. When an Englishman speaks to an Englishman about
ideas — political, economic, social — the communication is often equally blank, but
the hearer thinks he understands, and sometimes proceeds to riotous action. . . .

Failure of mental communication is painfully in evidence nearly everywhere
we choose to look. Pick up any magazine or newspaper, and you will find many
of the articles devoted to sound and fury from politicians, editors, leaders of
industry, and diplomats. You will find the text of the advertising sections de-
voted almost solidly to a skillful attempt to make words mean something different
to the reader from what the facts warrant. Most of us are aware of tne chronic
inability of school children to understand what is taught them; their examination
papers are familiar exhibits in communication failure. Let me put a question
to my fellow-authors in the fields of economics, politics, and sociology: How many
book reviewers show by their reviews that they know what you are talking
about? One in ten? That is about my ratio. Yet most of them assert that
I am relatively lucid, if ignorant. How many arguments arrive anywhere?8

Chase gives us some interesting examples of the obstructive social
illusions that we create through the misuse and misunderstanding of
words, especially when we get into abstractions:

Judges and lawyers have granted to a legal abstraction the rights, privileges,
and protection vouchsafed to a living, breathing human being. It is thus that
corporations, as well as you or I, are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. It would surely be a rollicking sight to see the Standard Oil Company
of New Jersey in pursuit of happiness at a dance hall. It would be a sight to see
United States Smelting, Refining and Mining being brought back to consciousness
by a squad of coast guardsmen armed with a respirator, to see the Atlas Corpora-
tion enjoying its constitutional freedom at a nudist camp. . . .

Corporations fill but one cage in a large menagerie. Let us glance at some of
the otner queer creatures created by personifying abstractions in America. Here
in the center is a vast figure called the Nation — majestic, and wrapped in the

7 November, 1937.

8 From The Tyranny of Words, copyright 1938, by Stuart Chase, pp. 14r-19. Re-
printed by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

458 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

flag. When it sternly raises its arm we are ready to die for it. Close behind
rears a sinister shape, the Government. Following it is one even more sinister,
Bureaucracy. Both are festooned with the writhing serpents of Red Tape. High
in the heavens is the Constitution, a kind of chalice like the Holy Grail, suffused
with ethereal light. It must never be joggled. Below floats the Supreme Court,
a black-robed priesthood tending the eternal fire. The Supreme Court must be
addressed with respect or it will neglect the fire and the Constitution will go out.
This is synonymous with the end of the world. Somewhere above the Rocky
Mountains are lodged the vast stone tablets of The Law. We are governed not
by men but by these tablets. Near them, in satin breeches and silver buckles,
pose the stern figures of our Forefathers, contemplating glumly the Nation they
brought to birth. The onion-shaped demon cowering behind the Constitution is
Private Property. Higher than Court, Flag, or The Law, close to the sun itself
and almost as bright, is Progress, the ultimate God of America.9

The misuse and misunderstanding of words brings about similar illu-
sions and misconceptions about personality. Chase illustrates this by
the popular notions of Tugwell and Landon during the presidential cam-
paign of 1936:

Another sad performance, closer to home, is the fabric of bad language which
entangled the names of Rexford Guy Tugwell and Alfred M. Landon in the
presidential campaign of 1936. The objective of the spinners, the publishers of
the majority of American newspapers — was to create a devil of the first and a god
of the second. With vast enthusiasm they plunged to the task. Round the word
"Tugwell" were woven emotive abstractions of the general order of: long-haired
professor, impractical visionary, public spendthrift and presently, agent of Mos-
cow, red, home destroyer, Constitution wrecker. Round the word "Landon"
were woven abstractions of the opposite emotional order — practical, honest busi-
ness man, meeter of payrolls, home lover, early riser, good neighbor, budget
balancer, Constitution defender; good, homely, folksy stuff. The real character-
istics of both men were swept away in this hail of verbiage, and citizens were
asked in effect to choose between Lucifer and the Angel Gabriel.10

What semantics, or the scientific and understanding use of words, really
does to the so-called prevailing knowledge, even the eternal verities of
philosophy, is graphically described by Chase :

Another matter which distressed me was that I found it almost impossible to
read philosophy. The great words went round and round in my head until I
became dizzy. Sometimes they made pleasant music, but I could rarely effect
passage between them and the real world of experience. William James I could
usually translate, but the great classics had almost literally no meaning to me —
just a haughty parade of Truth, Substance, Infinite, Absolute, Over-soul, the
Universal, the Nominal, the Eternal. As these works had been acclaimed for
centuries as part of the priceless cultural heritage of mankind, it seemed obvious
that something in my intellectual equipment was seriously deficient. I strove
to understand Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Herbert Spencer, Schopen-
hauer. The harder I wrestled the more the solemn procession of verbal ghosts
circled through my brain, mocking my ignorance. Why was this? Was I alone
at fault or was there something in the structure of language itself which checked
communication? . . .

»Ibid., pp. 22-23.

10 Harper's, November, 1937, p. 567.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 459

With the tools of semantic analysis, the authors laid in ruin the towering edifice
of classical philosophy from Aristotle to HegeL Psychology (pre-Freudian)
emerged in little better repair. Large sections of sociology, economics, the law,
politics, even medicine, were as cities after an earthquake. . . .

For the individual, as I can testify, a brief grounding in semantics, besides
making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classi-
cal economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials,
treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on
money and credit, accounts of debates, and Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers
in general. You would be surprised at the amount of time this saves.11

How devastating semantics is to modern propaganda is illustrated by
a reference to a sentence from one of Hitler's speeches, which reads as
follows :

The Aryan Fatherland, which has nursed the souls of heroes, calls upon you for
the supreme sacrifice which you, in whom flows heroic blood, will not fail, and
which will echo forever down the corridors of history.13

When submitted to the acid test of semantics, the speech comes out as
follows:

The blab blab which has nursed the blabs of blabs, calls upon you for the
blab blab which, in whom flows blab blab, will not fail, and which will echo blab
down the blabs of blab.12a

These inadequacies in language are especially dangerous in our machine
age. In the simple life of the old handicraft era, society was local and
men lived in face-to-face contact. Words applied mainly to objects and
to the realities of life. There was little reading or writing except on the
part of a small literate minority. In our day of power and machines,
culture transcends personal and community experience, and misunder-
standing is more frequent and more menacing:

Power-age communities have grown far beyond the check of individual experi-
ence. They rely increasingly on printed matter, radio, communication at a dis-
tance. This has operated to enlarge the field for words, absolutely and relatively,
and has created a paradise for fakers. A community of semantic illiterates, of
persons unable to perceive the meaning of what they read and hear, is one of
perilous equilibrium.13

It is difficult enough to solve our social problems if we have a full
comprehension of what they are. The outlook is hopeless unless we can
have some general understanding of our civilization. This is especially
true in a democratic society, the successful operation of which presupposes
an acquaintance on the part of the majority with the problems society
faces.

11 From The Tyranny of Words, op. cit., pp. 5, 8, 15. Reprinted by permission of
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
., p. 21.

is Ibid., p. 26.

460 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

The Invention of Printing and the Rise of Communication Through
Books and the Printed Page. While the art of writing began in the an-
cient Orient with the invention of the alphabet, books and printed com-
munication were a by-product of Humanistic scholarship in early modern
times. The recovery and editing of many Latin texts, the desire for
greater permanence and uniformity in both Greek and Latin, and the
growing volume of contemporary literature, all made imperative a more
facile mode of putting words on paper than the laborious copying which
existed from Oriental times to the close of the Middle Ages.

It is a common practice to refer to the "invention of printing" in the
fifteenth century. However, the elements which entered into the achieve-
ments of Coster and Gutenberg rested upon a complex of inventions run-
ning back over thousands of years.

The Egyptians suggested an alphabet before there was anything to
write upon except stone and clay bricks. The Syrian Semites, the
Phoenicians, and the Greeks perfected the Egyptian alphabet, and the
Romans invented the particular form of letters we now use. But in
classical times formal literature was written entirely in capitals, smaller
or lower-case letters being employed only in commercial and epistolary
documents. Small letters were first commonly used by Alcuin and his
monks in the days of Charlemagne, and are known as Carolingian minus-
cule.

The first writing material was stone. Then came the clay bricks of
Mesopotamia. The Egyptians used papyrus, brittle fabric made from
the fiber of a reed. The later Mesopotamians, the Greeks, and the
Romans used parchment, chiefly sheepskin, and papyrus. Papyrus
gradually went out of use in the early medieval period. It has been
humorously said that the prolific church fathers exhausted the supply,
but the Muslim occupation of Egypt had something to do with the dis-
appearance of papyrus in the West. Further, the codex, or first paged
book, then became popular, and papyrus was not so well adapted for this
as for the scroll book — papyrus or other material rolled on a rod. Hence,
parchment became the most common writing material from the sixth
•century to the thirteenth. Paper, after its migrations from China to
Egypt and Spain, was widely used in the West by the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries.

The first modern type of book — the codex — was found in the later
Roman Empire. It was a volume made up into rectangular pages, but
much larger than our books* Because of their form we refer to early
texts of the Bible, around the fourth century A.D., as the Codex Vaticanus,
the Codus Alexandrinus, and so on. Most of the beautiful books of the
medieval period had a larger format than is common today.

Early medieval bookmaking was done chiefly by monks. The closest
analogue to our publishing house was the monastic scriptorium, where
manuscripts were copied for secular as well as ecclesiastical purposes.
With the rise of universities, a moderately flourishing book trade de-
veloped. University authorities controlled the trade and supervised the

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 461

copying of textbooks. Lay scribes now entered the profession, although
the monks still dominated it. The copyists could meet the demand for
books because there was no such book market as there is today. Few
people could read and fewer could write. Of the literate minority, only a
small fraction needed books. Indeed, many an American artisan today
owns more books than were known even to the greatest scholars of the thir-
teenth century. The schools and universities used only a few textbooks,
and these sometimes remained unchanged for centuries. There was none
of our present high -pressure book salesmanship which leads to frequent
changes of texts. Aristotle's Logic was the same basic text in the seven-
teenth century as in the thirteenth. Until the Protestant revolt, few lay
communicants owned or read the Bible. A flourishing second-hand trade
existed, and students frequently rented books.

In the late fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, the practice of
printing from whole pages carved word for word on wooden blocks began
in western Europe. This device had been known in China many cen-
turies. It was a slow and expensive process. Only pages on which there
was more pictorial matter than text, or fragments of books in great
demand, like Donatus' Latin grammar, were printed in this way. These
block books were not widely produced and did not materially affect the
common practice of hand-copying.

The increasing intellectual ferment of the later Middle Ages, reports
of travelers, the rise of universities, the development of science, and, above
all, the Humanists' recovery of ancient texts were a combination of forces
which led to the printing of books on paper by means of movable type.

The modern art of printing began in western Europe with the invention
of separate, movable types for each letter of the alphabet. Words could
be assembled by hand and arranged to make up a page, which was then
printed on paper by means of a wooden hand press. When a page had
been printed a sufficient number of times, the type was removed from the
"form" and re-distributed alphabetically, and composition of the next
page was begun. This type, at first carved out of wood, was eventually
cast from metal. Once the die or pattern for a letter had been made,
countless letters could be cast from the same die. Printing was a slow
and tedious process until the invention of modern typesetting machines
— notably the linotype and monotype — in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century. These made it possible for the typesetter, or compositor
as he is usually called, by means of a few levers and a keyboard much
like that of a typewriter, to cast whole lines of type ready to be placed
in a press for printing. Though today large display type, newspaper
headlines, notices, printed cards, and so on, are set by hand, the bulk of
all reading matter is machine-set. The early printer, says Preserved
Smith:

. . . first had a letter cut in hard metal, this was called the punch ; with it he
stamped a mould, known as the matrix, in which he was able to found a large
number of exactly identical types of metal, usually of lead. These, set side by
side in a case, for the first time made it possible satisfactorily to print at reason-

462 TRANSPORTAtlON AND COMMUNICATION

able cost a large number of copies of the same text, and, when that was done, the
types could be taken apart and used for another work.14

Type forms (styles) were at first an imitation of the "black letter,"
made with a flat-pointed pen, which had been used in the handwritten
manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Later on stylized versions of the letter-
ing on Roman stone monuments and tablets were cast. Both forms have
survived. We see the medieval script today in German books, news-
papers, and magazines, as well as in the "Old English" and similar type
faces used for emphasis or display in legal and church documents, and in
newspaper titles — that of The New York Times, for example. The com-
mon "book" or "body" types such as the one used here arc derived from
the old Roman alphabet and the Carolingian minuscule of the Prankish
monks, and are commonly referred to as "roman" or "old style."

Half a century of careful research by scholars has failed to establish
with absolute certainty who actually invented printing by movable type.15
It is known, however, that the invention took place in the middle of the
fifteenth century. The two men for whom primacy is usually claimed are
Lourens Coster of Haarlem, in Holland, and Johann Gutenberg of Mainz,
in Germany. Coster died in 1440, and our only authority for his alleged
invention of printing is the statement of an individual who lived a century
later. Whether or not Gutenberg actually "invented" printing, he was
certainly the first to convert it into a practical art and a productive indus-
try. Yet, curiously enough, "nothing printed during his lifetime bears his
name as printer or gives any information about him in that capacity."
He was born in Strassburg in 1398 and died in Mainz in 1468. Some
authorities believe that he was engaged in printing as early as 1438, but
the first work definitely attributable to him is an indulgence printed in
1454. It is also believed that he printed Donatus' Latin grammar and
made a particularly beautiful edition of the Bible with forty-two lines to
a page. Whoever may have been the inventor of printing, it is certain
that by 1455 the practical and revolutionary character of the art had been
thoroughly demonstrated, and that it was no longer in the experimental
stage.

After the middle of the fifteenth century the printing industry de-
veloped rapidly. In 1455 Johann Fust, a former partner of Gutenberg,
and Peter Schoeffer formed the first great printing company. Schoeffer
introduced many inventions. He originated the use of lead spacing
between the lines, also printing in colors, and improved the art of type
founding. Strassburg, Augusburg, Cologne, and Nuremberg followed
Mainz as important German printing centers. The most famous German
printer of the early sixteenth century was Antony Koberger of Nurem-
berg, who made printing an international industry by sending his agents
throughout Europe to find manuscripts suitable for publication.

14 The Age of the Reformation, Holt, 1920, pp. g-9.

15 Pierce Butler, The Origin of Printing in Europe, University of Chicago Press,
1040.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 463

The craft spread to other parts of Europe. It reached Italy by 1465,
Paris by 1470, England by 1480, Sweden by 1482, Portugal by 1490, and
Spain by 1499. The recovery of classical manuscripts stimulated the
printing trade in Italy, especially in Venice. The freedom of the press
in Holland encouraged the printing industry there. It is estimated that
by 1500 there were in existence between eight and nine million printed
books of various kinds and sizes.

The invention of printing had incalculable consequences in the cultural
history of mankind. As W. T. Waugh asserts:

It may be an exaggeration to say that it is the most momentous invention in
the history of the world, but it is certainly the most momentous since that of
writing, and of more fundamental consequence than any of the countless inven-
tions of the last two centuries, however much they may have transformed the
conditions of life.16

Or as Professor Smith declares:

The importance of printing cannot be overestimated. There are few events
like it in the history of the world. The whole gigantic swing of modern democ-
racy and of the scientific spirit was released by it. The veil of the temple of
religion and of knowledge was rent in twain, and the arcana of the priest and
clerk exposed to the gaze of the people. The reading public became the supreme
court before whom, from this time, all cases must be argued. The conflict of
opinion and parties, of privilege and freedom, of science and obscurantism, was
transferred from the secret chamber of a small, privileged, professional, and
sacerdotal coterie to the arena of the reading public.17

Almost every social institution and most phases of our culture are in
one way or another instruments of communication. " For many thousands
of years the family was the chief center of communication. With the rise
of formal education, the school came to exercise a large part in the com-
munication function of society. The church and religion have done much
to promote communication. Libraries aid the process of communication
by gathering and storing the accumulated words and language of the
past and making them available for the present. Nearly every functional
group, from chambers of commerce to trade unions, exercises the respon-
sibility of communication in a greater or less degree.

In the remainder of this chapter, however, we shall be mainly concerned
with the new agencies of communication and transportation which domi-
nate our machine and power age. The activities of many of the afore-
mentioned instruments of communication are treated in other chapters
of the book.

The Revolutionary Character of Modern
Communication

The most notable aspect of contemporary technology has been the
improvement in the transportation of persons and objects and in com-

™ History of Europe from 1878 to 1494, Putnam, 1932, p. 517,
"Smith, op. cit., p. 10.

464 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

munication of information. It has broken down the isolation of previous
days and lessened the intellectual import of geographical distance ; it has
created new mental attitudes and modified the operation of older ones;
and it has produced a whole new series of social and cultural problems.

At the opening of the nineteenth century it took from four days to a
week to carry news on horseback from New York to Boston. The War
of 1812 began because there was no Atlantic cable to bring us the news
that the British had abolished their Orders in Council, which were the
immediate cause of our entering the war. Likewise, the bloody battle of
New Orleans was fought after peace had been signed by the British and
American delegates at Ghent. In the 'forties of the last century it
required five months of heroic effort by Marcus Whitman to make the
trip from the State of Washington to the City of Washington. Even as
late as 1909, when Admiral Robert E. Peary discovered the North Pole,
months elapsed before he could emerge from the polar region and make
his discovery known. When Admiral Richard Byrd discovered the South
Pole in 1926, however, The New York Times radio station picked up
the news of the crossing of the Pole as it was being radioed back by
Byrd to his base camp. From the standpoint of the communication of
information, then, distance has been almost eliminated.

A Brief Survey of the Development of the
Agencies of Communication

We have already pointed out that human civilization differs from the
life of lower animals mainly in being a symbolic culture made possible
by the mastery of language. The more rapid and facile communication
within and between groups has played a vital role in the course of history.

Groups which cannot communicate with others are almost sure to have
a backward, stagnant, and unprogressive culture. The greater the con-
tact between groups, the greater the possibility of spreading novel and
valuable information and of creating a progressive culture.

Communication created an inter-group and later an international eco-
nomic specialization and division of labor. The rice of commerce has
had a great influence upon social classes and political institutions.

In the social field, communication has brought about knowledge of new
folkways and customs, helped to create scepticism about older institu-
tions, promoted social flexibility and progress, and increased toleration.
The institutions of an isolated group are almost invariably backward and
stagnant. The character and social significance of the growth of com-
munication have been admirably stated by T. A. M. Craven:

If not the most important, probably one of the most important reasons for the
progressive widening of the individual human being's perception of the world
around him has been the tremendous growth in communications during the last
half century. This led to a concomitant shrinkage in the size of the earth as a
whole viewed from a relative standpoint, and today there is hardly a place on
the surface of the globe which is not within almost immediate hailing distance,

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 465

when we consider the hailing to be done by one of our many modern communica-
tion methods.

As man has learned to wrest from nature the various tools by which he enriches
human experience, communication has always been one of his immediate con-
siderations. In the days when social units consisted first of farlfclies and then of
clans, beginning with the Stone Age, man hewed his messages onto rough slabs
of rock broken from the walls of his dwelling place in the caves. Through the
times of the nomadic forest dwellers who signaled to one another by means of
crude marks chopped on the sides of trees and by smoke signals, down to the
present when two important business houses, one in London and the other in
New York, can carry on a highly technical arbitrage business with 16-second
delivery from sender to addressee, the need for communications has been one
of the first thoughts in the mind of man after his primary requirements of food,
shelter, and clothing were satisfied.18

The course of history well illustrates the importance of communica-
tion. Many isolated cultures have existed for thousands of years with-
out making any notable progress. Factors which promoted contacts,
travel, and the growth of trade helped to bring about the birth of civiliza-
tion in the ancient Near Orient. The progress of transportation to the
point of horseback travel and the building of passable roads made the
great Persian Empire possible. The civilization of the Greeks rested
largely upon the seafaring life of cities like Athens and their contacts
with most of the cultures of the Mediterranean basin. The Roman Em-
pire rested upon the most elaborate development of communication known
in the ancient world. But Roman imperial ambitions outran the trans-
portation and communication facilities of that era, and the inadequacies
thereof were a chief cause of the decline of the Roman Empire.

One of the main reasons for the backward character of medieval civi-
lizations was the destruction or decline of earlier methods of communica-
tion and the relapse into local and isolated cultures. Towards the later
Middle Ages, inventions such as the compass and other marine aids made
possible the conquest of the ocean, the discovery of America, the Com-
mercial Revolution, and the rise of modern civilization. The Commercial
Revolution led directly to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of our
modern methods of transportation and communication. Modern civi-
lization is, in large part, the product of ever improved methods of com-
munication and transportation. The world-wide aspect of our contem-
porary civilization is almost wholly an outgrowth of the present-day
agencies of transportation and communication.

Land transportation began on primitive footpaths. It later developed
into roads traversed on horseback and in carts and wagons. The Persians
were the first to develop a fair system of roads over great areas. The
Greek roads were notoriously poor, and this accounts for the backward
character of Greek culture in the states that did not have access to the
sea. The Romans were the greatest road builders of antiquity, but foot
and horse travel on the best of roads was not adequate to the needs and

18 Technological Trends and National Policy, Government Printing Office, 1937,
pp. 211-212.

466 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION .

perplexities of the vast Roman Empire. Medieval roads were poor
except where they could follow along the old Roman highways. Not
until Telford and Macadam introduced scientific road-building at the
beginning of tte nineteenth century were adequate highways provided
for modern life. These men made good roads possible; the invention
of the automobile made them mandatory. In the last half of the nine-
teenth century, railroads revolutionized land transport, and in the twen-
tieth century the automobile carried the conquest of land transport still
further. The airplane has revolutionized transport over both land and
water.

Water transport began with small rafts and rowboats on rivers. The
ancient world conquered the seas and modern civilization triumphed over
the oceans. The motive power for water transportation began with the
natural current of rivers. Then, in succession, boats were propelled by
oars and by sails; finally by steam engines, internal combustion engines,
and electricity.

Communication began among primitive peoples by signaling with
fires and smoke on hilltops. The Greeks signaled from towers on moun-
tains. Then, messages were carried by foot messengers and runners.
After the Kassites introduced the use of the horse about 2000 B.C.,
mounted couriers supplied the most rapid method of communication
known until the invention of railroads, except for the limited use of carrier
pigeons. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Chappee
brothers in France invented a method of signaling by semaphores which
was utilized to some degree by Napoleon. But the railroad provided the
most speedy means of communication prior to the invention of various
electrical devices after 1840, such as the telegraph, the telephone, and the
radio.

The steam engine and railroads made a dependable postal system
possible. In the twentieth century came the most rapid and spectacular
of all transportation triumphs, the airplane and air mail service. The
invention of printing facilitated the use of all these mechanical agents of
transportation and communication in transmitting information over wide
afeas. Especially important was the growth of the contemporary news-
paper as a medium of information which can be shipped rapidly over
great distances. But the newspaper depended not only upon the mechan-
ical art of printing and the rise of the railroad to transport printed papers
but also upon the new electrical devices which made possible the rapid
accumulation and transmission of news.

While newspapers date from the latter part of the seventeenth century,
the large modern daily newspaper could not have existed before the
American Civil War. It depends upon the linotype machine, which was
first introduced in 1876, and the rotary printing press, which was in-
vented a half century earlier but was not generally introduced into news-
paper offices until about the same time as the linotype machines.

Aside from the telegraph and Atlantic cable, the electrical equipment
upon which newsgathering depends likewise dates from the same period

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 467

or much later. The telephone was invented in 1876; radio messages and
pictures are a relatively recent achievement, coming since the first World
War.

The earliest successful demonstrations of the telegraph took place
between 1837 and 1844. The first successful Atlantic cable was laid in
1866. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. Marconi
sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic in 1901. Edison and
Armat laid the basis for the moving picture in 1895, but the first real
story movie was not turned out until 1905. It took 10 years more to
create large-scale movie production, which was first notably successful in
the "Birth of a Nation," presented in 1915. In 1927, the first crude sound
pictures were presented. The radio slowly progressed from 1909 until
1920, by which time its basic technical foundations, prior to frequency
modulation, had been worked out. But it took nearly 10 years more to
give us a first-class radio set. Today we seem on the eve of the radio
newspaper, which will automatically print the major news events of the
world. Television was steadily improved during the 'thirties and is now
being launched for commercial distribution. It combines the radio and
moving picture in reproducing current events.

Outstanding Improvements in Travel and
Transportation Facilities

Among the outstanding changes in communication agencies in the
present century has been the improvement and diversification of passenger
transportation due to better railroad transportation, the advent of the
automobile and motorbus, advances in the quality and mileage of good
highways, and the rise of airplane traffic.

The major aspects of railroad engineering, both with respect to rolling
stock and trackage, as well as the financial system associated with the
railroads, is a heritage from the last century. In 1940, there were
approximately 235,000 miles of railroads in the United States, with a total
operated trackage of 408,000 miles. This marked a slight decline from
the first World War period; in 1916 the mileage was 254,000 and the track-
age, 397,000. The high point was reached in 1929, with a mileage of
249,000 and a trackage of 429,000.

The outstanding items in American railroad history in the twentieth
-century have been the improvement in train construction and service and
competition by private automobiles, motorbuses, trucks, and airplanes.
In 1920, the railroad passenger-miles per capita amounted to 444.6.
There had been a definite gain since 1900, when the figure stood at 212.5.
The extent and sharpness of automobile competition in the 'twenties are
shown by the fact that, in 1930, the railroad passenger miles per capita
had dropped to 218.3, thus almost wiping out the gains of 30 years. The
figure continued to drop and stood at 179.2 in 1940, though this was an
advance over the depression years. Tables I, II, and III indicate the
recent history of railroad mileage and railroad traffic.

468 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

MILES OF RAILWAY LINE

The total mileage of railway lines in the continental United States is
shown in the following table: 10

TABLE I

TOTAL RAILWAY MILEAGE

1916 254,037 1932 247,595

1921 ::: 251,176 1933 245,703

1926 249,138 1934 243,857

1927 249^31 1935 241,822

1928 249,309 1936 240,104

929 ::.' 249433 1937 238,539

1930 249,052 1938 236,842

1931 .'.'..'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.' 248,829 1940 233,670

Figures follow showing the number of revenue passengers carried by
the Class I lines.

TABLE II
REVENUE PASSENGERS CARRIED

1916 1,005,954,777 1932 478,800,122

1921 ' .... 1,035,496,329 1933 432,979,887

1926 . . ' 862,361,333 1934 449,775,279

1927 " " 829,917,845 1935 445,872,300

1928 " . . 790,327,447 1936 490,091,317

1929 780,468,302 1937 497,288,356

1930 .' 703,598,121 1938 452,731,040

1931 "..'! 596,390,924 1941 486,582,138

i9 Figures in Tables, I, II, and III are taken from A Yearbook of Railroad Informs
tion, Association of American Railroads, Washington, 1940, with additions for 1941 ,

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 469

The following figures show the passenger traffic of the Class I railways
in terms of revenue passenger-miles.

TABLE III
TOTAL PASSENGER-MILES

1916 34,585,952,026 1932 16,971,044,205

1921 37,312,585,966 1933 16,340,509,724

1926 35,477,524,581 1934 18,033,309,043

1927 33,649,706,115 1935 18,475,571,667

1928 31,601,341,798 1936 22,421,009,033

1929 31,074,134,542 1937 24,655,414,121

1930 26,814,824,535 1938 21,628,718,038

1931 21,894,420,536 1941 29,359,895,428

In the 1920's the American railroads began to encounter serious com-
petition from automobiles, motorbuses, and trucks. Private automobiles
carried many on business and pleasure trips that had previously been
made by railroad travel. Even transcontinental trips began to be made
by motorbus. For shipments of perishable or relatively light commodi-
ties, especially on trips of 500 miles or less, automotive trucking proved a
serious competitor with the express and freight service of railroads. In
the 1930's air travel was added as another form of competition with rail-
road service.

After 1930 the railroads woke up and took belated steps to make train
travel more attractive and efficient. Some of the railroads reduced the
abnormally high passenger rates of 1914-1930, thus offering the induce-
ment of economy. The Interstate Commerce Commission compelled
many other railroads to reduce fares and thus increase revenue from
passenger traffic. The passenger fare was reduced throughout the coun-
try to two cents a mile in coaches, with some of the Southern railroads
dropping their rate as low as one cent a mile in coaches on all but the
crack trains. Since 1939 some railroads have facilitated travel, especially
summer travel, by making it possible to pay for long trips on the install-
ment plan. Railroad travel increased, though nothing like the traffic
before 1915 was ever recaptured.

There has been a marked improvement in the speed and equipment of
railroad trains. The conventional steam locomotives have been built to
travel faster and to draw more coaches, and many have been streamlined.
A number of railroad lines have been electrified, particularly on the
Atlantic Seaboard and in the Northwest. But the most remarkable in-
novation has been the development of Diesel-driven motor trains. One
of the pioneers, the Zephyr of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad,
covered the 1,015 miles from Denver to Chicago in 785 minutes, at an
average speed of 77.6 miles per hour, making a top speed of 112.5 miles.
Diesel-motored streamlined trains have now been rather widely intro-
duced, especially for traffic between Chicago and St. Louis, in the Mid-
West, and the Pacific Coast. They represent the most direct answer of
the railroads to both bus and airplane competition. Travel upon them
is clean, smooth, and swift.

470 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

Telephones and stock tickers have been placed in trains at terminals.
Radios have been installed. The better trains frequently have shower
baths, barber shops, beauty parlors, and luxurious lounging quarters.
Coach equipment has also been greatly improved, particularly on the
railroads of the Middle and Far West. One- or two-car trains, often
drawn by gasoline engines, have been installed for branch-line service.
The comfort of summer travel has been improved by the introduction of
air conditioning.

In a day in which automobile accidents are becoming ever more fre-
quent and deadly, the greater safety of railroad transportation cannot
be overlooked. The days of frequent and bloody accidents are past.
Steel coaches, automatic block signal systems, and the like, have reduced
passenger mortality. In the year 1935, not a single passenger was killed
while en route on a railroad in the United States. This is especially
impressive, when one reflects that the total passenger miles in this year
were over 18 billion, and approximately 450 million passengers were
carried. A serious railroad wreck is a rarity today and, almost without
exception, wrecks are due to a washout or some other "act of God," to
sabotage or criminal acts, or to gross disobedience of orders by train
crews. It would be difficult to reduce train wrecks below the current
minimum.

A final and more drastic method of dealing with motorbus competition
has been the growing trend of railroads to buy up motorbus lines.

The railroads could stand up under the new forms of competition more
successfully, were it not for the tremendous burden of overcapitalization
which they have inherited from the days of high finance in railroad con-
trol and operation back in the last century, when railroads were as much
gambling devices as transportation systems. Railroad financing and
business methods have greatly improved since 1900.

Most persons, when they think of railroads, limit their ideas to pas-
senger service, but the freight service is even more important in the
work of the nation. The competition of trucks after 1920 stimulated the
railroads to improve their freight facilities. Some of the more notable
gains in freight service have been summarized by M. J. Gormley, in an
article on "Railway Problems of 1941":

BAIL IMPROVEMENTS SINCE WORLD WAR

$9,500,000,000 spent since 1923 for improvements — divided 45 per cent for equip-
ment; 55 per cent for other facilities of all kinds.

Result of Expenditures

1,146,000 cars and

17,000 locomotives installed new since 1923
1,800,000 cars and

40,000 locomotives retired.
17% increase in capacity of cars
36% increase in capacity of locomotives

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 471

Efficiency in Operation

60% increase in train speed
100% increase in tons per train hour
62,000 cars per week can be loaded now for each 100,000 cars owned, compared

with a loading of

42,000 cars per week for each 100,000 serviceable cars owned in 1918.
8,000,000 more carloads loaded in 1929 than in 1918, with a considerable de-
crease in the ownership of cars and locomotives.

$30,000,000 less demurrage collected in 1939 than was collected in 1918, a decrease of
83%, with a decrease of only 30% in the number of loaded cars; a
further indication of more prompt unloading by receivers.-0

The total number of freight cars in the United States reached their
high in 1926, with 2,348,679 ; they had dropped to 1,650,031 in 1939. This
was offset in some degree by the greater carrying capacity of the newer
cars, but it reflected mainly the loss of traffic to motor trucks. There
were 2,764,222 of these registered in 1926, and 4,413,692 in 1939. The
average speed of freight trains increased from 11.9 miles per hour in
1926 to 16.7 in 1939. The efficiency of freight service per hour increased
from an average of 9,201 tons in 1926 to 13,449 in 1939.

The most important innovation in travel since the development of the
railroad has been the rise of the automobile. The essential mechanical
inventions upon which the automobile is based were made in the nine-
teenth century, but their application to the mass production of efficient
and attractive cars at a low price has been an achievement of the
twentieth century. Automobiles were becoming common on the eve of
the first World War, but their mass popularity really dates from the post-
war period. The mass production of cheap cars by Henry Ford first
became significant about 1913. But the Model T Ford was an un-
attractive vehicle. Ford finally gave up his Model T because General
Motors cut deeply into his market by producing a low-priced and more
beautiful car. It was not until 1928, however, that Ford produced a
car that was at once cheap, dependable, and attractive. Even more
advanced was his first eight-cylinder car produced in 1932. By this
time other motorcar companies, especially General Motors and the
Chrysler Corporation, had fallen in line with Ford's mass-production
methods and a new era of fast, beautiful, and dependable cars at a low
price came into being.

The peak of automobile production came in 1929, when a total of
5,621,715 cars and trucks were turned out in the United States and Can-
ada. There was a bad slump during the depression, but in 1936 and 1937
there was an approximation to the 1929 high, with a figure of 5,016,437 for
1937. Automobile registrations increased after 1929, reaching 31,468,887
in 1940. The automobile registration in the United States alone amounted
to over 70 per cent of the world's total, which was 45,422,411 in 1940.
Of these, 27,300,000 were passenger cars. The automobile has revolu-

20 Loc. cit., pp. 4-5. (Pamphlet published by the Association of American Rail-
roads.)

472 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

tionizcd the travel habits of America. As Malcolm M. Willey and Stuart
A. Rice have observed:

The American people have become remarkably mobile. The automobile has
fostered a widespread travel psychology. Spontaneity and universality dis-
tinguish contemporary from earlier travel. The popular expression "hop in" has
more than surface meaning; it typifies a state of mind. Travel for necessity
and travel for the sake of travel (pleasure travel) alike are involved in the
enhanced mobility. The trip of a few hours' duration (the drive) and the longer
pleasure trip (touring) have become accepted parts of modern life. It is the
general extension of the touring habit that is particularly impressive.21

The extent of automobile traffic is almost incredible. Willey and Rice
estimate that in 1930 some 404,000,000,000 passenger miles were traveled
by the occupants of passenger cars alone. This extensive automobile
travel has brought about many new economic problems and social habits.
Hotels have in many cases been thrown out of business, because people
preferred to keep on the move rather than to settle down in some tradi-
tional resort. The hotels that have survived have been compelled to
transform their facilities to deal with a transient automobile clientele
rather than with permanent seasonal guests. A large business has been
built up in the form of tourist lodgings in private dwellings. Then there
are many tourist camps. There is a growing tendency to license and
inspect such roadside camps.

A recent development has been the growth of the passenger trailer. It
is estimated that in 1936 about 50,000 tourist-type trailers were manu-
factured, &nd even this production could not keep up with the demand.
The trailers range in price from $200 to $4,000, the average being around
$650. Instead of merely putting Americans on wheels, trailers put the
American home on wheels. Roger Babson predicted that within twenty
years half the population of the United States would be living in trailers.
Any such spectacular development is unlikely, but no doubt the trailer
will contribute markedly to the mobility of the American population.
A most unfortunate development has been the increase of automobile
accidents. The fatalities therefrom in the United States ran to over
35',000 in 1940.

The effect of the automobile upon American morals is warmly debated.
It has served to undermine many of the old folkways and customs ; it has
somewhat lessened church-going; and it has probably led to greater laxity
in sex habits.

Motorbuses are somewhat inconvenient for long trips, but their cheap-
ness appeals to the mass of travelers. While much more safe than a
decade ago, they are still far behind the railroads from the standpoint of
safety and dependability in travel. The motorbus was fairly common
in urban transportation in large cities before the first World War, but its
use for interurban transportation has been chiefly a post-war develop-
ment. By 1930, motorbuses were carrying annually 1,778,000,000 rev-
enue passengers. By 1936, the figure had jumped to 2,869,000,000. In

21 Recent Social Trends in the United States, McGraw-Hill, 1933, Vol. I, p. 186.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 473

1940, the number was 4,238,000,000. There is an elaborate network of
motorbus lines covering the entire country, many of them operating swift
express buses in interstate traffic.22 In 1940 interurban buses carried
slightly over 350,000,000 revenue passengers. In the last decade, urban
motorbuses have all but supplanted the electric trolley lines. Motorbuses
have made possible the centralization of schools, which in turn has pro-
vided better plant equipment, a more adequate teaching force, and a more
diversified curriculum. At the beginning of 1941, school buses were
carrying approximately 4 million school children daily. The following
graph will give a comprehensive idea of the motorbus industry and service
at the present time:

How the Bus Industry
Serves America

Provides 54,000 Buses

A A A A A A A

Serves 4,000,000,000 Revenue Passengers

06 * 6 6 6 *

Operates 1,954,702,000 Revenue Bus Miles

Covers 343,300 Miles of Highway

I I II I I I I

Employs 125,000 Persons

Maintains 12,000 Garages and Shops

Provides 10,000 Terminals and Rest Stops

Courtesy National Association of
Motorbus Operators, Washington.

The private automobile and the motorbus have brought about a real
revolution in highway construction. Back in 1904, there were only about
150,000 miles of surfaced roads, with only 150 miles of high-type surface.
By 1930, the mileage of surfaced roads had increased to approximately
700,000, with some 125,000 miles of high-type surfaced roads. Highways
ceased to be primarily a local affair and were taken more and more under

22 For a graphic account of transcontinental travel by motorbus, see R. S. Tompkins,
"Ordeal by Bus," in The American Mercury, November, 1930. Motorbus travel
facilities have improved since 1930.

474 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

state control and supervision. On January 1, 1940, there were in the
United States some 540,000 miles of state highways, of which 410,000
miles were surfaced and 130,000 miles were of high-type surface. Most
of the improved highways of our day are state highways. The funds
for their constructing are made possible by revenues derived from motor
vehicle registration fees, gasoline taxes, bridge tolls, and fines. Federal
aid in building highways was notably extended under the New Deal.

The most spectacular innovation in transportation in the twentieth
century came with the conquest of the air. The first successful flight in
a heavier-than-air motor-driven plane was made at Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina, by the Wright brothers in 1903. In 1906 they made a non-stop
flight of 40 miles. Three years later Louis Bleriot flew across the English
Channel. The first World War brought about a number of technical im-
provements in airplane manufacture. Commercial airplane travel did
not, however, become notable in the United States until about 1926.
Since that time there has been a remarkable expansion. During 1940 the
major airlines of the United States carried 2,939,647 passengers, a new
record for commercial aviation in this country. Adding to this the
passengers carried on trips in Canada and Latin America, the grand total
was 3,162,817. This may be compared with 5,782 passengers in 1926,
and 1,020,931 in 1936. The number of passenger-miles flown were
1,261,003,818, and some 12,282,560 pounds of express matter was carried.
The pound-miles of air mail increased from 8,265,000,000 in 1936 to
20,147,000,000 in 1940. The graphs below and on page 476 present the
main facts about the development of airplane traffic and the progress in
the safety of air travel since 1926.

TOTAL ROUTE MILES

Source- Civil Aeronautics Journal

60 SO

THOUSANDS OF MILES

Note: Figures for the year 1939 and 1940 do not
include the operations of the following affil-
iated companies of Pan American Airways
System: Cia Mexicana de Aviacion, S. A., Cia
Nacional Cubana de Aviacion, and Panair
do Brasil, which prior to the year 1939
were included with International figures.

DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL

1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940

20 tO 0 • 0 10
CALENDAR YEARS

40 90 60
THOUSANDS OF MILES

From Little Known Facts, Air Transport Association of America.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 475

The speed of these commercial airplanes makes air travel especially
alluring to those who must, or believe they must, make fast time. It is
possible to leave New York late one afternoon and have breakfast the
next morning in Los Angeles. One can fly from Cleveland to New York,
transact a day's business, and be back in Cleveland that night for dinner.

The main drawback to air transportation is the relatively precarious
nature of air travel, which has not yet been made as safe as land trans-
portation. Very few accidents today are due to defects in planes or to
the incompetence of pilots. As Marquis W. Childs has pointed out:

It is true that for ordinary purposes of flight under ordinary circumstances
the modern airplane is a thoroughly reliable machine. . . . The machine itself
can be counted upon for an almost perfect performance. The pilots are of an
equally high order. Out of a great surplus of pilots "the airlines choose by an
almost superhuman set of requirements and rigorous examinations the best
men." 23

Most airplane accidents happen during what is known as "blind fly-
ing," namely, flying through fog or bad weather which makes it impossible
to see the ground and observe the ordinary signals that can keep an
airplane on its course. Blind flying with passengers is not permitted in
most European countries, and this restriction accounts for the low mor-
tality rate of European air travel, in spite of the fact that Europeans
admit that the United States leads the world in airplane engineering and
navigation.

The dangerous tendency to indulge in blind flying as a general practice
in American air travel is due in part to the unwillingness of air lines to
admit that their mode of navigation is more at the mercy of the elements
than railroad and bus traffic, and other competitive modes of travel. But
more than this it is due to the mania of Americans for speed in travel and
the saving of time for something or other. Passengers often urge air
transport companies to make trips against the latters' better judgment
and resent those cancellations which the air companies feel are warranted
by adverse flying conditions.

Next to the speed mania of the passengers comes the competitive spirit
in air travel. This induces certain air lines to undertake travel in bad
weather and thus demonstrate superiority over their competitors. Then
we have the competition of air lines in trying to beat their rivals to the
airports, resulting in rash navigation and congestion at landing fields.

We may well regret any black eye given to air travel, for the latter is
a substantial and permanent addition to human transportation. But it
is well to know where the reforms must be achieved. The sensible thing
is to follow the European practice in tabooing blind flying. As one
realistic commentator has observed, "it is better to be ten hours late in
New York or Los Angeles than thirty years early in Hell."

It is well, however, to bear in mind that air accidents are few and
trivial compared to our banner method of killing off Americans, namely,

23 Harper's, October, 1936.

476 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

TOTAL PASSENGER MILES FLOWN

REVENUE AND NON-REVENUE

1

t

)OME

STIC

AND

INTE

RNA

TION

At

Source; Cvil Aeronautics Joumtl

vxj Urr/eis Monthly Keporu

1927

1927

1926 NotAyoiloUe

1928

M

H

1928

1927 "

••

1929
1930
1931
1932

84,014,572
106,442,375
127,038798
173,492,119

1

•1

1929
1930
1931

Note: Figures for the yeer 1939 and 1940 do not
include the operations of the following affil-
| lated companies of Pan American Airway*
i System. Cia Mexicana de Avtacion, S. A,, Cia
1 National Cubana de Aviacion, and Panair

1928 "
1929 '
1930
1931
1932

19732,677
14,680,402
21,147,539

1934
1935
1936

167,858,629
313,905,508
435740,253

1

•

•LI
••

1932
1933

I do Brasil, which prior to the year 1939
• were Included with International figures.

1933
1934
1935

26,283,915
38792,228
48,465,412

1937
1931
1939
194Q.

476,603,165
557719,26*
749787,096
1.144 163J18*

I

•1

•I

•1

1934
1935

£

1937
1938

1939

58443,618
76,045,474
77436,916
85,03,146

940 1

16j840,C

=

=

=

••J1937

5

DH.S*

IOC*

) X

10 1C

10 7<X

60

0 »

X> 40

0 30

0 20

0 10

0 0 C

•i

10

1

0 20

0 »

0 4(

0 SO

0 60

0

700 1C

O X

10- 1A

M

MILLIONS OF MILK

CALENDAR YtARS

MILLIONS OF MILES

MILES FLOWN PER FATAL ACCIDENT

'DOMESTIC AIR CARRIERS) So™. C™t AWM* A,AM,

1936
1937
1938
1939
1940

EACH SYMBOL IS THE EQUIVALENT
OF 80 TIMES AROUND THE WORLD.
OR 2 MILLION MILES OF FLYING

41.28S.76?
"i tt.266,812

From Little Known Facts, Air Transport Association of America.

automobile travel. While following the headlines with respect to color-
ful air accidents, we too often forget that, in 1937, nearly 800 Americans
lost their lives in automobile accidents over the Christmas week-end
alone. The increased safety of air travel may be seen from the fact that,
in the eighteen months prior to August, 1940, there was not a single
fatality in civilian air travel within the boundaries of the United States.
But it was evident, from the fact that there were five bad accidents be-
tween August, 1940, and March, 1941, that Utopia had not been realized.
Nevertheless, air travel is becoming ever safer. The striking progress in
safety is shown by the fact that in 1936 the miles flown per fatal accident
were 7,972,153, while in 1940 they were 36,266,812.

Progress in the Means of Communication

The TekgrapL Of all the innovations in contemporary civilization,
probably no other group of changes has been quite as spectacular and

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 477

significant as the development of the contemporary means of communi-
cation. As Willey and Rice point out:

An interconnected system of communication has come into existence whereby
the individual is enabled at scarcely a moment's notice to place himself in contact
with almost any other person in the nation. Speed and distance concepts, again,
have been totally recast. No longer do men in any part of the world live to
themselves alone. For an increasing majority in the United States and for a
substantial fraction in the whole western world, the telephone bell is always
potentially within ear shot, the postman and telegraph messenger are just around
.the corner and the cable and wireless may bring messages which are dated the
day after they are received.24

Of the methods of communication which depend on electricity, the
telegraph came first. It rested upon certain advances in electro-magnetic
science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The idea
of sending messages by electricity was first set forth by an anonymous
writer in Scott's Magazine in England in 1753. The first transmissions
of messages were made by a German, Karl A. Steinheil, in Munich, in
1837, and by Sir Charles Wheatstone in England in the same year. But
the practical beginnings of the electric telegraph date from the message
transmitted from Baltimore to Washington by Samuel F. B. Morse in
1844. After Morse's time, telegraph facilities on land developed speedily.
Wires were strung on poles between cities, and in due time underground
cables in conduits were provided to put the city wires under the streets.
The transmitting capacity of a given mileage of wire was increased by
mechanical devices for sending and receiving the Morse code at high
speed. The multiplex system of transmission, invented by Edison and
Baudot in 1874, and improved in 1915, made it possible for a single wire
to carry eight messages simultaneously. The sheer speed of transmission
has been increased threefold. A message can be sent from New York to
London in 16 seconds. By 1927,25 there were 2,145,897 miles of single
wire and 257,000 miles of telegraph pole lines in the United States, and
their efficiency for the transmission of messages was three or four times
as great as the same number of miles would have been at the opening of
the century.

The most remarkable advance since the first World War has been the
development of the automatic teletypewriter or printer's telegraph. This
has all but superseded the Morse code. The operator no longer has to
master the complicated Morse code; he needs only to be a competent
touch typist. The operator writes on his teletypewriter, and all instru-
ments connected with it can type the same message anywhere in the
country. This device simplifies and increases the speed of transmission
at least twofold. In the transmission of news, where one operator sends
messages to a number of receivers, it is estimated that the teletypewriter
increases the efficiency of telegraph service by the ratio of fifteen to one.

24 Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. I, p. 216.

25 The figures are approximately the same today.

478 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

From 1930 to 1940, the Morse code operators were very generally sup-
planted by teletypists. This even took place among railroad telegraphers.
In 1910, some 90 per cent of the telegrams were sent by Morse code; to-
day over 95 per cent are transmitted by the automatic telegraph type-
writer. It has also meant a shift in the sex of operators, since most
teletype operators are women. An automatic self-service telegraph which
the public can operate is now in the process of perfection and will prob-
ably soon be put into active use. It will be an advance comparable to
the automatic switchboard and the dialing system in telephony.

The increased use of the telegraph is evident by the fact that, in 1917,"
the number of messages sent was 158,176,000, whereas the number of
messages transmitted in 1937 was 218,115,000. This greater use of the
telegraph has been brought about in part by the encouragement of the
social use of the telegraph for cut-rate holiday and greeting messages, and
the like. Over twelve million are sent annually. Reduced rates are in
operation for so-called tourist telegrams, for which ten words relating to
travel can be sent anywhere in the United States for thirty-five cents.
There has also been a drastic cut in the rates for overnight letters. Skill-
ful advertising, suggested by E. L. Bernays 26 and others, has popularized
the use of the telegraph. The great advantage of telegraph service today
lies in its rapid transmission of long-distance messages at a rate far under
that charged for telephone messages.

The general expansion of the telegraph business and facilities since the
first World War may be seen from the fact that between 1917 and 1937
the investment in plant and equipment increased by 108 per cent;. the
number of messages sent, by 38 per cent; the number of employees, by
13 per cent; and the operating revenue, by 27 per cent.

The telegram still remains psychologically the most important com-
munication which the average man can receive. The fact that a telegram
comes less frequently than letters or telephone conversations accounts in
part for its importance. As Willey and Rice put it, "A crisis psychology
has been involved in its use and its receipt." Wider use of the telegraph
for rather trivial social messages and greetings may in time modify this
traditional attitude.

A generation after Morse first demonstrated the practicality of the
telegraph, Morse and F. N. Gisborne interested Cyrus W. Field in laying
an Atlantic cable. After a series of failures, success crowned their efforts
in 1866. Field was aided by the great English physicist Lord Kelvin.
By 1931, there were 21 cable lines connecting North America with Europe.
The first Pacific cable was laid in 1902. Greatly increased efficiency has
been achieved in laying cables. Especially important is the recently
invented device for plowing cables into the bottom of the ocean. This
eliminates damage to cables by fishermen, which formerly involved an
annual repair bill of around $500,000. The efficiency of cable systems
has paralleled that of land telegraph systems. Better relaying equipment

26 Bernays invented the slogan, "Don't write, telegraph."

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 479

has reduced the personnel required by 25 per cent. The Permalloy
cable, introduced in 1924, increased the transmission capacity from 60
words a minute to 500 words a minute. The competition of wireless
telegraphy, which was probably the most dramatic development of the
twentieth century, forced a considerable reduction of rates, thus in-
creasing the use of the cable.

The idea of a wireless telegraph was suggested by Steinheil in 1838.
The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi (1874- ) who began to work
on his invention of wireless telegraphy about 1890, made use of the dis-
coveries of Heinrich Hertz with respect to the transmission of electro-
magnetic waves through the ether. In 1899, he sent a message across the
English Channel, and in 1901 across the Atlantic Ocean. The first com-
mercial trans-Atlantic wireless telegraphy service was launched in 1908.
Regular trans-Atlantic service began in 1910. In 1914, wireless service
between San Francisco and Honolulu was established, and the next year
between Honolulu and Japan. After the first World War, the United
States took the lead in promoting wireless communication with all the
major states of the world. The number of commercial wireless messages
transmitted increased from 154,000 in 1907 to 3,777,000 in 1927. While
most 'trans-oceanic communication is still carried on by cable, wireless
telegraphy is constantly gaining in importance. It made the countries
of the world partially independent of cables, in case the use of the latter
should for any reason be temporarily suspended. Wireless telegraphy
has been especially important in connection with the more scientific
control and guidance of ocean navigation and, along with wireless
telephony, is even more necessary to commercial aviation.

Probably the wireless system will ultimately supplant cable telegraphy.
But the latter represented the first important stroke in shrinking the size
of the planet, so far as the transmission of information is concerned.

In Europe, the telegraph lines have been usually owned and operated
by the governments. A similar development would once have been easy
in this country, for in 1845 Congress was offered the opportunity to buy
Morse's rights to the telegraph patents for $100,000. Partially as the
result of the opposition of the Postmaster General, Congress turned down
this offer, thus taking a critical step in the history of American communi-
cations. What is usually regarded as a natural public function was
turned over to private agencies.

A number of companies tried to make money out of the new telegraph
business, but the Western Union Telegraph Company soon assumed
leadership. It has its origins in the New York & Mississippi Valley
Telegraph Company, organized in 1851 by Hiram Sibley, Ezra Cornell,
and Samuel L. and Henry R. Selden of Rochester, N. Y. In 1854-1856,
the Rochester company bought up most of the existing small lines and
formed Western Union in April, 1856. Cornell, founder of Cornell
University, gave the new company its name. It built the first trans-
continental telegraph line, which was opened in 1861. In 1866, it
absorbed its leading competitors, the American Telegraph Company and

480 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

the United States Telegraph Company, and moved its headquarters from
Rochester to New York City. By this time it had 2,250 offices and 75,000
miles of wire. In 1870, it inaugurated the practice of sending money by
telegraph. Today about 275 million dollars is transferred each year by
telegraph.

In the latter part of the century the rapid growth of the daily news-
papers, with their telegraph services, helped on the growth of the tele-
graph. In the present century, the telegraph stock-ticker systems also
became a stimulus to telegraph activity. In 1911, Western Union entered
extensively into the cable service and now has over 30,000 nautical miles
of submarine cable. The new Permalloy cables can handle 2,400 letters
per minute. In spite of the ingenuity and competition of the Postal
Telegraph Company, Western Union controls today about 80 per cent
of the telegraph business of the country. The following statistical facts
will show the extent of the activities of Western Union:

1,876,867 miles of wire
211,530 miles of pole line
30,324 nautical miles of ocean cable and
4,070 miles of land line cable
19,543 telegraph offices
16,208 telegraph agency stations
31,000 employes
12,000 messengers
3,400 stock quotation tickers
120,000 time service units
3,000 baseball tickers
28,933 stockholders

11,000 observations for daily weather reports
$99,704,000 gross operating revenue (1940)
$3,621,000 earned net income (1940)

The company prints each year an average of one billion telegram blanks.

An average of from 150,000,000 to 200,000,000 telegrams are handled a year, and
the company transmits as much as 275 million dollars in telegraphic money orders
annually.27

The Postal Telegraph Company grew out of the activities of James
Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, and John W. Mackay. They
formed the Commercial Cable Company in 1883 and cut cable rates to
Europe from 40 cents to 25 cents a word. Then they turned their atten-
tion to land telegraphy and formed the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company
in 1886. The company prospered under the direction of Clarence H.
Mackay, son of the founder. It transmitted about 39 million messages
in 1940, and had a total revenue of about 22 million dollars.

The Telephone. The telephone represents an even more popular appli-
cation of the services of electricity in the field of communication than the
telegraph. The first successful transmission of a telephonic message took
place on March 10, 1876. It was sent by Alexander Graham Bell, who,
along with his associate, Thomas A. Watson, is generally credited with
the invention of the telephone, in June, 1875, though Elisha Gray long

27 Statistics furnished by the Western Union Company.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 481

DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONES
January 1. 1940

ALL OTHER EUROPEAN ^rm***^**— FRANCE

COUNTRIES ^ ..-.»'-.'.'. l-v.-.-.-.-.^-.^

.^. n'l'' ' ".' r^T'*'" r^ , • GREAT

ALL OTHER •..,-.......,,.•..,.,.•.•/..• ..:...-......%...:»*

COUNTRIES

CANADA

GERMANY

OWNERSHIP OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONES
January 1, 1940

'GOVERNMENT
40°/o

PRIVATE
60°/o

Courtesy American Telephone & Telegraph Co.

contested his claim. A large number of technical improvements followed
Bell's original telephone, among which we may note the provision of a
more efficient transmitter, the development of signaling devices, the con-
struction of ever better and multiple switchboards, the increase in the
number of wires carried on the same line, with the ultimate development
of the underground telephone cable, the elimination of cross-talk by the
two-line system, the phantom circuit and the development of the carrier
system, automatic repeaters and current amplifiers, and toll switching
plans, which made possible the ever more efficient handling of long-
distance calls. Perhaps the most striking innovation has been the dialing
system and the automatic switchboard. This has reduced the number
of operators required to handle calls. It is comparable to the teletype-
writer and automatic telegraph in the telegraph field. Overseas tele-

482 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

phone service was instituted with Europe in 1927 and with South America
in 1930. In 1935 the first telephone call was sent around the world.

The mass popularity and enormous growth of telephone service are
shown by the fact that, in 1900, there were only 1,355,000 telephones in
the country, while in 1940 the number had increased to 21,928,000, about
half of the telephones in the world. The estimated week-day telephone
communications grew from 7,882,000 in 1900 to 98,300,000 in 1940— an
estimated 30 billion for the whole year. As with the telegraph, so with
the telephone, there has been an attempt to increase its use by special
rates, particularly for long-distance calls. Evening and Sunday rates
are much lower than those during business hours on week-days. The
graphs on page 481 present the distribution of the world's telephones and
the mode of ownership.

The ever greater accessibility of the telephone has developed what has
been called the "telephone habit," and we become ever more dependent
upon this instrument.28 The telephone industry is the third largest public
utility industry in the United States. It is exceeded only by steam and
electric traction and by the electric, gas, power and light industries. In
1940, approximately $5,380,000,000 was invested in plant and equipment,
and the gross operating revenue was $1,310,000,000. Approximately
335,000 persons are employed in the industry. The monthly payroll is
over 60 million dollars. There are almost exactly 100 million miles of
telephone wires in the United States and some 15 million telephone poles.

There are several companies engaged in promoting international tele-
phonic connections, of which the most important is the International
Telephone & Telegraph Corporation, in which the Mackay interests are
dominant. In 1932 they operated some 803,000 telephones.

As in the case of the telegraph, the history of the telephone industry is
one of progressive coordination and consolidation under private control.29
The idea of government ownership was anathema in the laissez-faire,
plutocratic politics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The
first telephone company to be formed was the New England Telephone
Company, set up in February, 1878, as a trusteeship of the Bell interests
under the leadership of Gardiner G. Hubbard and Thomas Sanders. It
was widened to a national business when the Bell Telephone Company
was organized in July of the same year under the same interests. The
two parent companies were merged as the National Bell Telephone Com-
pany in 1879. During this year the Western Union Telegraph Company
carried on a bitter fight with the Bell Company in an effort to corner
the telephone business. The outcome was a compromise, in which all
telephone business was assigned to the National Bell Telephone Com-
pany and all telegraph business to the Western Union Telegraph Com-
pany. The Bell system has been even more successful than Western
Union in well-nigh monopolizing the business in its line of communica-

2* On the social, economic, and cultural influence of the telephone, see M. M.
Dilts, The Telephone in a Changing World. Longmans, Green, 1941.
29 See Horace Coon, American Tel. and Tel, Longmans, Green, 1939.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 483

tions, though it took a number of years to accomplish this result. In
1880, the American Bell Telephone Company was created to control and
direct the Bell interests, with Theodore N. Vail and William H. Forbes
as the leading executive figures. In 1885, the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company was formed, for the special purpose of perfecting
long-distance service and connecting city exchanges. Vail was named
president, with Edward J. Hall as general manager and Angus J. Hibbard
as general superintendent. In 1900, the American Telephone and Tele-
graph Company was changed from a subsidiary to the controlling element
in the Bell system, which is today made up of A.T.&T. and some 24
associated companies. At that time, the Bell Company conveyed its
assets to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which is the
coordinating and consolidating organization in the American telephone
industry of today. The following table indicates the development of the
Bell System since 1920:

BELL SYSTEM STATISTICS

Number of Telephones (a)

Number of Central Offices

Miles of Pole Lines

Miles of Wire :

In Underground Cable

In Aerial Cable

Open Wire

Total

Average Daily Telephone Conversations:

Total Plant

Number of Employees (c)

Number of A.T.&T. Co. Stockholders ....

(b)

Dec. 31. 1920
8,133,759
5,767
362,481

14,207,000

6,945,000

3,711,000

24,863,000

33,125,000

$1,373,802,000

228,943

139,448

Dec. 31 1939
16,535,804
7,001
397,202

52,041,000

28,910,000

4,586,000

85,537,000

73,802,000

$4,590,510,000

259,930

636,771

(a) Excludes private line telephones numbering 77,495 on December 31, 1939. Includ-
ing telephones of about 6,500 connecting companies and more than 40,000 directly and
indirectly connecting rural lines, the total number of telephones in the United States
which can be interconnected is approximately 20,750,000.

(b) For the year 1939 there were approximately 71,200,000 average daily local con-
versations and 2,602,000 toll and long distance conversations, an increase of 5.6% and
6.5%, respectively, over the year 1938.

(c) In addition, the Western-Electric Company, Inc., and the Bell Telephone Labo-
ratories, Inc., had 37,197 employees on December 31, 1939.

The following table presents a general picture of the whole telephone
industry of the United States, at the end of the year 1941 :

STATISTICS OF TELEPHONE INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES
DECEMBER 31, 1941

Number of Companies

Number of Central Offices

Number of Telephones

Miles of Wire

Investment in Plant and Equipment . .
Total Operating Revenues — Year 1941 . .
Average Daily Telephone Conversations

during 1941

Number of Employees

Bell System
Companies
25
7,128
18,841,000
95,127,000
$5,048,000,000
$1,299,000,000

84,690,000
313,600

All Other
Companies*
6,436
11,621
4,680,000
10,423,000
$652,000,000
$146,000,000

19,510,000
63,400

Total
United States
6,461
18,749
23,521,000
105,550,000
$5,700,000,000
$1,445,000,000

104,200,000
377,000

* Partly estimated.

484 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

The telephone has extended the range of human conversational powers
to an incredible degree. It is now possible to speak by word of mouth
to any part of the civilized world with relative expedition. The tele-
phone is also invaluable and indispensable in the transaction of modern
business activities. It is no longer necessary to have a plant located
close to the executive offices. This will permit the break-up of our great
urban communities, if and when this is found desirable for various social
and cultural reasons. The telephone has conquered distance and busi-
nessmen no longer need to be close together to carry on speedy and per-
sonal conversations or conferences.

(

UNITED STATES
SWEDEN
NEW ZEALAND
CANADA
DENMARK

TELEPHONES PER 100 POPULATION
January 1,1940
D 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

SWITZERLAND
AUSTRALIA
HAWAII
NORWAY

GREAT BRITAIN
GERMANY
NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
FINLAND
LATVIA
FRANCE
ARGENTINA
URUGUAY
JAPAN
CHILE
HUNGARY
ITALY
CUBA
LITHUANIA
MEXICO
RUSSIA
BRAZIL

1

=

r

[TOTAL WORLDl

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Telephones per 100 Population

Courtesy American Telephone & Telegraph Co.

The necessity of safeguarding the privacy of so tremendously important
an enterprise in contemporary civilization led the courts for a long time
to forbid the admission of evidence obtained by wire-tapping. During
the hysteria connected with Prohibition enforcement, the Supreme Court
decided that evidence obtained by wire-tapping could be admitted in
court. But in December, 1937, a more liberal Court reversed this decision
and outlawed wire-tapping. There has been a revived effort to restore

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 485

the practice in wartime, and partial success in so doing was accomplished
by a Supreme Court decision in April, 1942.

Railroads, vessels at sea, airplanes, and the like, are, in differing de-
grees, dependent upon telephonic and telegraphic communication. Our
railroad system would be paralyzed were it not for the electrical trans-
mission now used for block-signaling devices and the sending of messages
relating to traffic control. The airplane is particularly dependent upon
radio connections. It is obvious that the gathering and transmitting of
news, which has made possible the modern daily paper, is absolutely
dependent upon electrical communication.

Even a brief survey of American communication agencies would be
incomplete without at least a reference to the work of Theodore Newton
Vail (1845-1920). He was the outstanding figure in the development
of American communications. Starting out as a telegraph operator, he
became a mail clerk and, in time, was made General Superintendent of
Railway Mails in 1876. While in the mail service he revolutionized the
rapid delivery of mail over wide areas. He promoted civil service in
the railway mail department and created the first fast mail deliveries
in the country. In 1878, he became General Manager of the Bell Tele-
phone Company. It was he who organized the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company, which secured control of the Bell System. In
1887 he retired from the telephone business and devoted himself to the
electrification of South American railroads. In 1907, he returned as
President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, reorgan-
ized the system, and created its contemporary efficiency. He attempted
to absorb the Western Union Telegraph Company, but, as we have seen,
was prevented by the government from carrying out this program in open
fashion. But for a time, Western Union was dominated by the A.T.&T.,
and it was during this period that Vail introduced such notable innova-
tions as night and day letters, cable letters, and week-end cables. In the
last years of his life Vail was primarily interested in wireless telephony,
and the development of the radio owed much to the active support which
he gave to the experimentation. Communication requires consolidation
for the most efficient service. Consolidation and efficiency were the main
ideals of Vail's career.

Improved Postal Service. While the telephone and telegraph are fre-
quently thought of as the more spectacular triumphs in the field of com-
munication, the role of the post office should not be overlooked. Postal
service began in the courier service initiated by King Cyrus in ancient
Persia and by Julius Caesar in the Roman Empire. About 300 A.D., the
Emperor Diocletian set up a limited postal system for private persons,
probably the first of its kind in history. The Roman Catholic Church
maintained a remarkable system of couriers in the Middle Ages. The
first private postal system was introduced by the University of Paris
about 1300 to handle the correspondence of that great University, which
drew students from all parts of Europe. In 1464, Louis XI established

486 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

a royal postal system for France and a century later this was used by
private persons. The first postal system in Germany was opened in the
Tyrol in the latter part of the 15th century. Early in the next century
Charles V greatly extended the imperial postal service to keep in touch
with all of his far-flung realms. Private postal routes of limited length
were created in England under Edward III. In 1635, a postal service
was launched from London to Edinburgh. In 1644, a weekly postal
service was provided for all the main cities of the country. A postal
service was created in the American colonies in 1691, when Andrew
Hamilton was appointed postmaster-general for the colonies. It covered
the chief settlements from Maine to Virginia. But the systematic postal
service of the world began with Rowland Hill's reforms in England, fol-
lowing 1837. By this time the railroad could be exploited for more rapid
and efficient postal service.

Rowland Hill worked out a scheme for the cheapening of mail distribu-
tion which has been widely imitated, with many variations. Hill recom-
mended the use of postage stamps at uniform cost for letters to all parts
of England. Since Hill's time the standardization of the rates for the
transmission of letters, irrespective of distance, within any national
boundary has become ever more prevalent. In international agreements
such as those which formerly prevailed between England and the United
States the same postage rates were applied to a letter sent from Chicago
to London or New Zealand as applied to a letter sent from Chicago to
Springfield, Illinois.

Of enormous importance in the improvement of the postal system in
the United States has been the extension of rural free delivery beginning
in 1899. This puts at the disposal of the agricultural population most
postal advantages hitherto restricted to city populations. Here, the
automobile has recently proved of great utility in mail delivery.

A leading social feature of the cheapening of postal service and the
standardization of rates was the fact that it democratized postal service.
Hitherto, only the wealthy had been able to dispatch letters frequently,
and even then the service was none too rapid or dependable.

, The increase in the extent of the mail service in the United States can
be seen from the following statistics. In 1890, about 4 billion pieces of
mail were handled; in 1900, this had increased to over 7 billion; in 1910,
the figure stood at nearly 15 billion; in 1930, it had grown to about 28
billion; and in 1939 some 26,445,000,000 pieces of mail were handled.
The development of rural free delivery in the present century has greatly
increased the volume of mail sent by rural areas and received therein.
The length of rural free delivery routes totaled about 1,500,000 miles
in 1941.

The speed and dependability in the handling of first-class mail have
improved within the present century and the per capita contacts effected
thereby are greater. Our modern business system would be nearly para-
lyzed if it were compelled to return to the system of mail distribution
of the world as it was in 1830, when national postal systems were usually

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 487

unknown or privately owned, and letters had to be transmitted by coach
or courier, traveling slowly and on no regular schedule.

There has been a great technical improvement in the methods of trans-
porting mail, particularly through closer cooperation with the railroad
service. The mail service has improved with every advance in the tech-
nical efficiency of the railroad. Various devices have contributed to the
more rapid handling of first-class mail, such as pre-sorting of mail in
railway mail cars, the use of motor vehicles in gathering and delivering
mail, postal tubes, and mechanical canceling devices. The public in-
sistence upon speed in communication is exemplified by the fact that
special delivery mail has increased twentyfold since 1900. . But the most
remarkable contribution of the century to the hastening of first-class
mail service has been the institution of air-mail transportation. At only
double the cost of ordinary first-class postage, letters may be sent by air
across the continent in a few hours. We have already noted the enor-
mous increase in the volume of air mail.

The Daily Newspaper as a Medium of
Communication

The daily newspaper is one of our more important media for the com-
munication of information to tens of millions of readers. It gathers up
news from all over the world and makes it speedily available to the read-
ing public. It also presents the opinions of special writers on various
topics of the day. Some provision is made even for pcrson-to-person
communication through the correspondence columns which most daily
papers maintain. Through various forms of organization, making use
of the instruments of communication which we have described above, the
newspaper does for the nation or region what the hangers-on in the
country grocery store and the gossips in the rural town used to do for
the rural neighborhood a century or so ago. It gathers and prints the
news and gossip of the world in formal and systematic fashion, whereas
these earlier disseminators of news and gossip informally picked up
mainly local materials and transmitted them by word of mouth.

Newspapers were essentially a gift of the printing press. They began
to appear a century or so after the invention of printing in the middle
of the fifteenth century. We find references to newspapers in the Nether-
lands at the close of the sixteenth century. In the first quarter of the
seventeenth the Gazette of Antwerp was being illustrated with wood-
cuts. A century later, Daniel Defoe's classic, Robinson Crusoe, was run
in a serial fashion in a London newspaper. The first newspaper in
America was established in the English colonies at the close of the seven-
teenth century. The first important free press battle in the colonies was
the famous Zenger case, fought out in New York City in 1734. Zenger
was prosecuted for alleged libel of the government, but the jury freed
him on the ground that his charges were true. After the Revolutionary
War, papers became more numerous. The development of political par-
ties and factions helped to increase the prevalence and popularity of the

488 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

newspaper. The contemporary newspaper has reached its highest devel-
mcnt in the United States, though England follows closely. On the Euro-
pean continent there is nothing approaching the American newspaper for
size or variety of content, though some Continental journals, such as the
Frankfurter Zeitung, before the rise of Fascism and Nazism, ranked ahead
of most American and English papers for intelligent editorial interpreta-
tion of current events and world trends.

Nothing in American life has more closely followed the trends in cul-
ture and economic development than the newspaper.80 At first, the
American newspapers were slight personal organs, usually founded to
advance some individual or partisan project or to vent personal spite.
They rarely appeared at uniform intervals. The "editorial" attitude
dominated entirely and there was little news printed.

In the second third of the nineteenth century, newspapers improved in
quality, size, and influence, though the editorial interest and function still
prevailed over the news element. News was published, but it was far
more scanty than today, and the publisher all too often even "editorial-
ized" the news so as to make it seem to vindicate editorial opinion. The
papers were read chiefly by partisans to enjoy the editorial judgment and
flavor of the paper. Both editors and readers were usually bitterly par-
tisan. Among the more representative papers of this era were the New
York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley; the Chicago Tribune, edited
by Joseph Medill ; the New York Times, edited by Henry Raymond ; the
New York Evening Post, edited by William Cullen Bryant; the New
York Sun, edited by Charles A. Dana; the Springfield Republican, edited
by Samuel Bowles; and the Albany Evening Journal, edited by Thurlow
Weed.

The improvements in the mechanics of printing, the provision of inter-
national newsgathering agencies, the expansion of American industry
and business, the concentration of large populations in our cities, and the
like, encouraged the rise and triumph of the commercial newspaper, in
the period between 1870 and the first World War. A very important
aspect of this change in journalism lay in the fact that the former zeal
to express strong editorial judgments was slowly but surely subordinated
to the publisher's aspiration to make a personal fortune out of his news-
paper or newspapers. The papers, for the first time, became newspapers,
properly so called. Nevertheless, even the news interest was mainly
important as the means of enriching newspaper publishers. William
Allen White succinctly put the essence of this phase of the revolution in
journalism when he observed that, in the process of this transition,
journalism ceased to be a profession and became an investment.

The formula for a successful newspaper was slowly but precisely
worked out. Readers and mass circulation are to be attained through

s°For a history of American journalism, see F. L. Mott, American Journalism,
Macmillan, 1941; and for contemporary American journalism, see A. M. Lee, The
Daily Newspaper in America, Macmillan, 1937; and M. M. Willey and R. D. Casey
(Eds.), "The Press in the Contemporary Scene," The Annals, 1942.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 489

publishing attractive and often sensational news. Many interested read-
ers insure wide circulation for the paper, and a newspaper with an exten-
sive circulation presents a favorable medium for commercial advertising.
It is primarily from advertising that newspapers make their profits.
Even a vast circulation does not pay expenses through subscriptions and
newsstand sales. Wide circulation creates a profit only indirectly
through the resulting gains from extensive and well-paid advertising.

The newspaper thus became an agency for selling lively news to attract
a multitude of readers, before whom advertising could be placed, with
direct profits for the newspapers and indirect profits for the advertisers.

The major figures in this revolutionary transition from the editorial
sheet to the true newspaper, with commercial aims, were James Gordon
Bennett of the New York Herald, Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun,
Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, William Randolph Hearst of the
New York American (and Journal) , and E. W. Scripps of the Cleveland
Press. Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth) followed the procession
with his London Daily Mail. Contrary to general impression, however,
the most blatant attempt to gain circulation by sensational and scandalous
news has not been made by an American paper, but by the London News
of the World, owned by Lord Riddell, who died at the close of 1934.

The quest for circulation through mass appeal has given rise to the
"tabloid" newspapers, with their small and convenient format, their
visual appeal, and their ultra-sensational news.31 The experiment has
in general proved successful, and the New York Daily News has the larg-
est circulation of any newspaper in the world. The tabloid need not
necessarily be sensational. The first tabloid, E. W. Scripps' Chicago
Day-Book, was highly serious, severely editorial, and carried no adver-
tising. One of the most dignified and reliable of modern newspapers,
the Washington Daily News — a Scripps-Howard paper — is published in
tabloid format. The New York Post, the oldest and long the most dis-
tinguished of New York dailies, turned tabloid in the spring of 1942.
An interesting addition to tabloid journalism has been the New York
newspaper, PM, launched in 1940. Its policy called for the printing of
news interpretations rather than news accounts, and for operating with-
out advertising, with the view of keeping editors free from business
pressure in their selection and interpretation of news.31a

One of the most important recent developments in newspapers is the
growth of newspaper chains. These have come about as a result of per-
sonal ambition, the desire for centralized control, and the economies of
management, talent, and administration. The chains represent the prin-
ciple of business consolidation applied to the commercial newspaper.

By 1930, about one sixth of the morning and evening newspapers were
organized in chains, which controlled about one third of the total daily

81 See Emile Gauvreau, My Last Million Readers, Dutton, 1941.

81aFor an interesting and authoritative description of the history and policies
of PM, see the articles on Ralph Ingersoll by Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker,
May 2, 9, 1942.

490 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

newspaper circulation and about one half of the Sunday circulation.
The most important chains were those of Hearst and Scripps-Howard.
Since 1930, there has been some decline in the number of chains and the
papers controlled by them. This has been especially true of the Hearst
group. The Scripps-Howard chain, established by E. W. Scripps for the
championship of labor and the underdog, long retained a liberal and in-
dependent outlook. In the last few years, however, it has turned to
"Red-baiting" and a generally critical attitude towards organized labor,
a change attributed by some to the rise of the Newspaper Guild.32

The number of daily papers reached its peak in 1917, with some 2,514
dailies. Consolidations, mergers, and discontinuations brought the num-
ber down to 1,877 in 1940. Weekly newspapers, mainly country publica-
tions, fell off from 15,681 in 1900 to 12,636 in 1931, the decline being
generally attributed to the fact that rural free delivery brought the city
daily to the farmer's door and that the local dailies in the near-by cities
published personal news and gossip concerning the rural areas in which
their papers might circulate. Evening newspapers have become more
popular than morning papers, probably due to the greater amount of
leisure time for reading in the evening. In 1940, there were 380 morning
papers and 1,497 evening papers, with 524 Sunday papers. The morning
circulation was 16,114,018, the evening circulation 24,895,240, and the
Sunday circulation 32,245,444, this last a gain of nearly 6 million over
1930. The second World War stimulated reader interest, and in 1941
newspaper circulation reached an all-time high, with a total of 41,131,611
newspapers sold.

The fact that advertising is the chief source of newspaper income can
be seen from the fact that the revenue therefrom amounted to well over
800 million dollars in 1929, while only 325 million was derived from news-
paper sales. The depression and the increased appropriations for radio
advertising cut down the newspaper advertising revenue to a little less
than 525 million dollars in 1935. The second World War is likely to have
a disastrous effect on the economics of newspapers. Priorities and other
sales restrictions are bringing a marked reduction in advertising, while
excitement over the war is producing greater circulation. Without added
advertising revenue, however, increased circulation is a financial liability
to newspapers. Probably most war-mongering newspapers did not fore-
see this situation, since the period of the first World War was one of
marked newspaper prosperity. Then, however, there was far less re-
striction of the advertising and sale of consumers' goods.

In former days most newspapers were definitely partisan, but in the

32 On the downfall of Scripps-Howard liberalism and related topics, see the articles
on Roy W. Howard by A. J. Liebling, in The New Yorker, August 2, 9, 16 and 23,
1941. The author errs, however, in attributing chief responsibility to Mr. Howard.
It lies, rather, with W. W. Hawkins, chairman of the board of directors, G. B. Parker,
editor-in-chief, and John H. Sorrells, executive editor. Of course, in a negative way.
the responsibility is Mr. Howard's, for he has always had the power to assert himsejf
and overrule these nien,

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 491

twentieth century there has been a growth of political independence. In
1930, 505 papers listed themselves as Republican, 434 as Democratic, and
792 as independent in politics. But the overwhelming majority are
economically partisan, namely, conservative. The number of genuinely
liberal papers in the country has declined alarmingly since 1933.

The development of the daily newspaper of today has been made pos-
sible by a number of important technological advances, such as better
facilities for rapid printing, and the utilization of electrical communica-
tion for the gathering and transmission of news.

The mechanical processes for the printing of the first newspapers in
^he seventeenth century were crude. Pages were printed by pressing
i flat frame of type on the sheet of paper, and all type had to be set by
i&nd. The first important improvement was the cylindrical press, which
fvas adapted from a device used for printing calicoes. It was successfully
ised in the office of the London Times in 1812, and in America by the
Philadelphia Ledger in 1846. The cylindrical press was not generally
ntroduced in pressrooms, however, until about 1880. It was a great
improvement over the old frame press with respect to both speed and
efficiency.

Since 1880, the evolution of printing presses has been a remarkable
lemonstration of modern mechanical ingenuity. One of the latest print-
ing presses can print, fold, cut, and count no less than 1,000 thirty -two-
sage newspapers per minute. The use of these improved printing presses
would not be possible, were it not for an equally remarkable development
3f typesetting machinery already described above. With the new lino-
type machinery, typesetters can keep pace with the speed of the printing
oress. The combination of the telegraph, the telephone, radio, the rotary
press, and the linotype machine enables us to read the news about events
in a remote area that may have taken place only an hour or so before
the newspaper is on the street.

A remarkable new invention, the "teletypesetting" machine, has been
tvorked out in recent years. A master copy is cut in a perforated tape.
When this copy is corrected and put in a properly equipped teletype-
setting machine, it can be set simultaneously and automatically by elec-
trical control on scores or hundreds of other typesetting machines many
miles apart, if necessary, with no human aid and without the slightest
oossibility of a typographical error. This invention seems bound to
revolutionize mechanical production in certain newspaper plants, espe-
cially those under chain management.

One of the major phases of mass appeal in modern newspaper publica-
tion is the appeal of pictures. The tabloid specializes in these, but even
the most dignified newspapers make wide use of pictures, particularly
those portraying various crises, such as floods, earthquakes, and battles.
Between 1924 and 1933 a series of electrical inventions brought about
the telephoto device, which sends satisfactory pictures instantaneously
through wire transmission. Beginning about 1935, the American news-
papers began to install telephoto equipment, and pictures from all over

492 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

the world were sent over the wire as rapidly and almost as satisfactorily
as news dispatches.

Without a cheap and serviceable paper on which to print material, all
the other marvelous accessories of newspaper production would be essen-
tially worthless. Rag paper could not be provided in sufficient quantity
or with sufficient economy. Wood pulp has supplied the only material
capable of making practicable newsprint (paper) at a sufficiently low cost.
The manufacture of wood-pulp paper, based on Rene Reamur's studies of
nest-building by wasps, began about the time of the Civil War. Paper
production had increased in volume in this country from 127,000 tons
in 1867 to 11,000,000 tons by 1929. The total world production in 1929
was 23,400,000 tons. The world production of newsprint (paper for
newspapers) in 1929 was 7,319,000 tons, about one third of the total pulp
paper production. The amount of forest reserves needed to furnish
wood pulp for newsprint is incredible to those unfamiliar with the facts.
It requires about 300 acres of forest to furnish enough pulp to get the
paper to print one Sunday issue of The New York Times. Owing to the
short life of wood-pulp paper, some newspapers publish a special edition
on rag paper for preservation in libraries.

The development of modern printing machinery would have been of
little value without the corresponding development of elaborate organ-
izations for gathering news. If every newspaper were compelled to sup-
port its own correspondents in all parts of the world and to maintain its
own telegraphic and cable connections, only a few great newspapers could
meet the expense. But through the extensive machinery of newsgather-
ing agencies such as the Associated Press, the more significant or sensa-
tional information from all parts of the world is put at the disposal of
newspapers for a relatively small expenditure. These agencies are elabo-
rate organizations of correspondents gathering news, and of cables, tele-
graphic communications, and radio stations essential to the rapid trans-
mission of the information thus gathered. While, from the standpoint of
technical efficiency, the newsgathering agencies have achieved remarkable
progress, the adequacy and accuracy of their service have been criticized.
The type of news that will be gathered inevitably depends to a great ex-
tent upon the economic, social, and intellectual attitudes of the subscribing
newspapers or their advertisers. Only "acceptable" news will be gathered
and transmitted. Then the already selected news gathered by corre-
spondents tends to be further sorted out by editors for its mass appeal
and emotional content, not for its educational value. In short, the news-
gathering agencies naturally gather, and the editors print, the news that
will "take" or sell. The newspapers using the service .often distort the
facts by still further editing and rewriting the information secured. In
this way, much really significant news is lost to the public and much that
is actually printed is highly unreliable.

The extensive suppression and deliberate distortion of foreign news,
according to social bias, by even the best newspapers, was well brought
out by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz in their study of the news on

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 493

Soviet Russia, printed over a considerable period of time in The New York
Times. Their findings, printed in their book Liberty and the News,™
had a notable effect on the Times, leading, among other things, to the
appointment of Walter Duranty, probably the most objective foreign cor-
respondent of our era, as Times correspondent in Russia.84 The exposure
also exerted a salutary influence on many other American papers.

Especially in war time is news distorted and suppressed. We usually
find that the zeal, indeed, necessity, to get news in the exciting days of war
time leads to the demand that correspondents invent news if they cannot
get it. In such cases they usually invent news which they think will be
favorably received at home. An outstanding example of such creative
imagination, even by high-grade correspondents, were the sensational
stories on the war in Norway in the spring of 1940, especially the widely
read tale that Norway fell primarily because of elaborate Fifth Column
activities by Germany in Norway prior to the war. Any such interpre-
tation was later repudiated, even by intensely anti-Nazi but honest Nor-
wegian refugees.80 Much of the news on the Russo-Finnish War was
sheer invention, because the correspondents were denied access to the
front. In spite of these defects, however, it is certain that we have
profited through securing more rapidly gathered and unprecedentedly
varied information from all over the face of the earth.

The oldest of the American agencies is the Associated Press, founded
in 1848 and reorganized in 1900 under the leadership of Melville Stone.
It is a cooperative newsgathering agency, the annual costs of around
10 million dollars being distributed among the member papers, roughly
according to the importance of the territory and the size of the paper.
It is not a profit-making institution and its services are available only to
its members, namely, those who hold an Associated Press franchise. It
had about 1400 members in 1940. The Associated Press maintains an
elaborate corps of foreign correspondents and reporters, but most Ameri-
can news is gathered by the staff of member papers in each locality.
They put on the A.P. wires all local news which they consider significant.
Papers which have an Associated Press franchise cannot furnish news to
any other newsgathering agency. The fact that most of the American
papers in the A.P. group are relatively conservative means that the
majority of the news gathered by A.P. papers and transmitted over the
A,P. wires has a conservative flavor. Special representatives of the Asso-
ciated Press are provided to covers news in the more important centers,
such as Washington and state capitals, and a flock of them are immedi-
ately dispatched to any locality visited by disaster or any other event
requiring special news coverage.

The United Press agency was founded by E. W. Scripps in 1907, because
he feared the results of a newsgathering monopoly, particularly under

33 New Republic Press, 1920.

34 Interestingly enough, Mr. Merz is now editor of the Times.

35 See "The Fifth Column," Bulletin of Institute for Propaganda Analysis, July 8,
1940.

494 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

conservative auspices. It was really put on the newspaper map by Roy
W. Howard between 1912 and 1920. Howard made the best possible use
of the special advantages created by the first World War period. For
example, it was Howard who got the famous "knock-out victory" inter-
view with Lloyd George on September 29, 1916, but his alertness and
energy got a little out of hand when he sent the false Armistice cable on
November 7, 1918. The United Press is a strictly commercial news-
gathering organization. Through its paid staff it gathers news from
all parts of the world and sells its services to such papers as desire to
avail themselves of the opportunity. It works on a profit basis. Down
to 1919 it served mainly the evening papers, but since that time it has
adapted its service to both morning and evening papers. It has over
1200 clients among the American newspapers. Most of the better papers
avail themselves of both the A.P. and U.P. services. Due to its origin
under E. W. Scripps' auspices, the U.P. was for some years more aggres-
sive and liberal than the A.P, and more interested in gathering and trans-
mitting news relative to the doings of labor. This difference hardly exists
today.

It was natural that Mr. Hearst should form his own newsgathering serv-
ice. He was often denied direct access to A.P. facilities and he did not
care to increase the revenues of the United Press, which was owned by
the Scripps-Howard organization, his chief journalistic rival in the chain
realm. So he developed the Hearst International News Service, which
serves around 700 papers at the present time, including the Hearst chain.
Following the well-known Hearst formula, the International News Serv-
ice has provided more sensational material than either the A.P. or the U.P.

As newspapers have become more extensive and diversified, it has
proved profitable to develop organizations which furnish newspapers with
special features, such as columns by distinguished or popular writers
and cartoon and picture service. The most extensive and profitable of
these services is King Features, owned and operated by the Hearst inter-
ests, but utilized by many other papers. Next to this comes the News-
paper Enterprise Association, which is owned by the Scripps-Howard
organization. The latter organization, incidentally, had the ingenuity
to "gobble" what was for some years the most important feature property
in the history of American journalism, the exclusive rights to news about
the Dionne quintuplets. For a number of years they attracted more
readers than an international crisis or the most shocking murder. The
Scripps-Howard concern has another feature service, known as United
Features, a subsidiary of the United Press. This service created a great
flurry a few years ago by obtaining the rights to Dickens' unpublished
Life of Christ for Children, which proved one of the most profitable tem-
porary feature items in American journalistic history. The Associated
Press also has attempted several ventures in the feature field, but its
accomplishments here have been far less impressive than those of the
Hearst and Scripps-Howard organizations.

It might be worth while to say a little more at this point about the

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 495

nature and operation of newspaper chains. There are a number of
advantages in chain newspaper operation. It can provide far greater
talent in every phase of newspaper work than the individual paper. The
Scripps-Howard organization could, for example, hire the highest-priced
editorial writer in the United States, at a cost per paper little greater
than the amount paid to a cub reporter in any locality. And this one
editorial writer could provide national and international editorials suffi-
cient for the needs of all the papers in the chain. The same considera-
tions apply to all phases of newspaper material suitable to be printed
throughout the country. Moreover, a chain can present a united front,
thus giving it great power in various political crusades. If a chain stands
behind a particular member paper which is being fought by advertisers,
the paper cannot be ruined through the temporary withdrawal of local
advertising support. Chain organization thus makes newspapers a
greater force for good, if they see fit to make use of their power in this
manner. It is obvious that chain newspapers can provide far higher
talent in every phase of newspaper work than the individual paper if they
wish to do so. But this advantage has been offset to some degree by the
fact that individual papers can also often buy the same type of material
from the feature services at a low cost.

Unfortunately the chain newspapers can also be a powerful force for
evil. Since there is centralized control, a wrong-headed editorial policy
can be spread all over the country. By and large, however, the manage-
ment of a powerful chain is likely to represent newspaper talent superior
to the staff of a local journal. Therefore, the errors and biases of a
chain management are not likely to be any worse than the errors and
biases of local publishers and editors. The ukases of Mr. Hearst are
rarely worse than the stupidities of local publishers and editors. It has
been shown that big business in the United States is more open-minded
and far-sighted than little business. This situation also applies to the
managers of newspaper chains, as over against the majority of local
publishers and editors.

The degree to which local editors are given freedom and initiative in
chains, depends both upon the chain involved and the circumstances at
any given time. Hearst editors have had very little personal leeway.
Scripps-Howard editors have been given a greater degree of freedom,
particularly in dealing with local matters. But chain management means
essentially newspaper despotism. When it is a benevolent despotism it
produces the best in American journalism, but when it is a benighted
and absolute despotism, it can create the worst features of contemporary
newspaperdom.

Since our contemporary newspapers rely upon news and features to gain
the circulation necessary to obtain advertising revenue, we should look
briefly into what newspapers consider the most suitable material for
mass appeal. Karl W. Bickel, long president of the United Press, said
that newspapers want material in both news and features which will pro-
voke strong human emotions. Another able journalist stated that the

496 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

best newspaper material will provoke in the reader what he described as
the "Gee Whiz" sentiment. This will serve to explain the unparalleled
popularity of the Dionne quintuplets.

Boiled down to its essence, the newspapers want hot news. And this
"hotness" is of a twofold character. News should be "hot" from the
standpoint of its emotion-provoking content, and it should be "hot" in the
sense of being up-to-the-minute. It should be as personal as possible
and concentrated on emotional situations such as love, romance, sin,
murder, death, and war.

Upon no matter do newspapers concentrate their energy more com-
pletely than upon the effort to have news as up-to-the-minute as possible,
one of the great feats of newspaperdom being to "scoop" a rival. The
haste of newspapers often approaches the ludicrous. There is a frantic
effort to get into headlines material which the world would be just as well
off for knowing a week later, and in too many cases would be better off
for not knowing at all. This fantastic straining for "spot news" has be-
come a fundamental journalistic habit and one which is not likely to be
uprooted. However, since the radio has ousted the newspaper from
supremacy in first divulging news material, newspapers may emphasize
interpretative news to a greater extent in the future.

The fact that news is here today and gone tomorrow — or sometimes
gone in the next edition on the same day — greatly lessens the value of the
newspaper as an agency for information and education. The trivial
character of too much of the news, together with the highly transient
character of the majority of the news, makes it impossible for the average
reader to understand the nature and import of what he reads in the news-
papers. The latter provide constant distraction instead of encouraging
concentrated interest and intelligent interpretation.

The technique and ethics of the gathering and printing of news today
have, however, produced one notable advantage. Except in war time,
such news as is printed is usually set forth without editorial distortion.
True, editors usually select from the vast mass of material the news which
most appeals to their biases and prejudices. But they do not normally
maltreat what they do put in print. The character of modern news-
gathering has been mainly responsible for this. Sirice all newspapers
get essentially the same news through the A.P., the U.P., and other agen-
cies, each editor knows what other papers receive in the way of news
dispatches. Hence it is easy to detect a competing editor's distortions,
or, as it is usually described, the "editing" of his news columns. Readers
can also detect editorial distortion of the news through the fact that they
have accessible several newspapers which present news accounts of the
same daily events. In this way, an unprecedented degree of accuracy has
been produced in the publication of conventional news. The editorially
far more aggressive newspapers of the days of Horace Greeley never even
approximated such a straightforward presentation. Of course, by his
personal selection of the news to be printed from the vast amount of copy
supplied, an editor can present to the readers of his paper a highly dis-
torted view of what is going on. There is, moreover, a wide leeway for

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 497

distortion of the news on the part of special correspondents. Not in-
frequently the same paper publishes on the same day two versions of
the same events which differ diametrically upon many important aspects
of the events recounted.

Despite the triviality of too much of our news, which is little more than
glorified gossip, there is no denying the fact that far more high-grade
material is carried today than ever before in American newspapers.
More and more attention is paid to cultural, scientific, and religious ma-
terial. More space is devoted to such items in one of our better news-
papers in a week than was given over in three months a generation back.
Especially marked has been the improvement in the treatment of inter-
national news and the space alloted to it. Certain areas have been
almost literally rescued from oblivion. More news on South America,
for example, is now carried in one day than was carried in a month two
decades back.

The desire to attract wide interest on the part of a reading public that
is often neither too well educated nor too intelligent has given rise to a
characteristic newspaper style — racy, pungent, staccato, and often not
too solicitious of the facts. But certain great newspaper stylists have
been produced, of whom the best-known contemporary examples have
been Heywood Broun, regarded by many as the outstanding journalistic
writer in the history of American newspapers, and Walter Lippmann,
once a valiant liberal, but now the chief ornament of the reactionary
press. Other columnists have introduced even more original styles.
Westbrook Pegler has enlivened journalism by carrying over the manner
of the prizefight reporter and bar-room controversialist into comment on
public affairs and world politics. Walter Winchell has captivated thou-
sands of readers by his racy banter and his projection of "gent's room"
witticisms into a highly popular daily column. Dorothy Thompson, in
her earnest and assured appraisal of current events, has provided us with
a rich and warm emotionalism, hitherto known only in "personal advice"
columns conducted by Beatrice Fairfax and Dorothy Dix.

One of the penalties paid for mass circulation and the distraction of
readers by trivial news of high emotional content has been the marked
decline of the influence and prestige of the editorial page. Despite the
great technological improvements, the newspapers are declining in their
influence upon American opinion. This was strikingly illustrated by the
presidential campaign of 1936, when the editorial opinion of the country
was lined up against Mr. Roosevelt by a ratio of far more than two to
one. But the people read the news, listened to the campaign speeches
over the radio, and, in spite of all editorial frenzy, put Mr. Roosevelt back
into the White House by an unprecedented majority. The same situation
was duplicated in 1940, when most of the newspapers heartily supported
Wendell Willkie, but Mr. Roosevelt was reflected by a large majority.

This mass scepticism and indifference with respect to American news-
paper editorials is probably the most promising sign to appear in Ameri-
can democracy in some decades. It indicates the weakening of the influ-

498 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

ence of one of the most vicious forms of propaganda, which has been the
more dangerous because it has also been so eminently respectable. It is
not out of reason to predict the disappearance of the editorial page from
most of our newspapers. Indeed, it is already apparent that the editorial
page of some of our very best newspapers is a marked liability to each
of the newspapers in question. Despite its waning influence, the style of
editorial writing has improved since Greeley's day; there is more fact and
argument and less pure ranting.

The newspaper columnists have taken over much of the prestige for-
merly enjoyed by the editorial in wielding reader opinion.30 Distributed
by powerful newspaper syndicates, the interpretations of the columnists
on public affairs reach millions of readers. Among the more popular
are Walter Lippmann, Frank Kent, Raymond Clapper, Drew Pearson and
Robert Allen, David Lawrence, Jay Franklin, Dorothy Thompson, Hugh
S. Johnson/™'1 Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, and Samuel Grafton.
Since the columnists inject their personalities into their writings, they
naturally attract more attention than the anonymous editorials. Fur-
ther, their columns are usually more vividly written.

The columnists reflect mainly Eastern Seaboard opinion, which is gen-
erally internationalist, and conservative economic and financial opinion.
The East thus possesses a disproportionate influence in shaping national
opinion. For example, these columnists, with exceptions, exerted power-
ful pressure in creating war sentiment before Pearl Harbor, and took the
lead in labor-baiting after we entered the war.

The editorial influence of newspapers is both lessened and confused as
a result of the fact that most papers use columnists who often present a
point of view at direct variance with the editorial opinion of the paper
or with each other. While it is excellent for newspaper readers to
broaden their outlook by getting diverse points of view on public affairs,
the editorial attitude of the paper is blurred, and the likelihood of definite
editorial direction of reader thinking is removed. Probably the most
effective means by which a newspaper can propagandize its views lies in
the selection of news and columnists, in the placing of unfavorable in-
formation in an obscure position on an inside page or giving a prominent
place to favorable information, and in the emphasis given in the writing
of headlines.

It is impossible to understand the contemporary newspaper unless one
realizes that journalism has become primarily a big business enterprise.
Interest is centered mainly upon making money rather than upon illumi-
nating the public, or providing intelligent guidance for public opinion.
What was once primarily an intellectual enterprise, however biased and
mendacious, has now become almost wholly a business venture. Honest
newspaper publishers freely admit this in private. The formula of

36 On these columnists, see Margaret Mitchell, "Columnists on Parade," in The
Nation, February 26-June 25, 1938; and Quincy Howe, The News and How to
Understand It, Simon and Schuster, 1940.

sea General Johnson died in April, 1942.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 499

modern journalism is simple and direct. "Hot" news possessing great
mass appeal is published to secure a large circulation. A large circulation
commands high advertising rates. And from advertising revenue, which
reached its all time high in 1929 at over $800,000,000,000, the newspapers
make most of their profits. The most successful newspaper in existence
would lose a large sum of money each year if it had to depend on circula-
tion revenue alone. We have already seen that, for example, in 1929,
newspapers derived about three times as much from advertising as from
circulation.

This overwhelming importance of advertising has led to the argument
that newspapers are the unwilling slaves of their advertising clientele.
Their publishers are portrayed as men who would dearly like to be liberal
and aggressive, but are afraid to incur the displeasure of the advertisers.
However, most of them are as liberal in their journalism as they wish to
be. They are restrained much more by their own state of mind than by
the intimidation of advertisers. A clothing manufacturer, for example,
is not expected to jeopardize his business in the interest of elevating
humanity, and there is no more reason to expect a newspaper publisher
to do so.

A powerful newspaper would, in most cases, be able to defy advertisers
within the bounds of reason. It could appeal to readers and even bring
about a boycott of stores or of the products of advertisers which could
be proved to be opposed to the dissemination of truth. Even in smaller
cities, newspapers are generally as indispensable to the advertisers as the
advertisers are to the newspapers, and could exercise a great deal of free-
dom and independence. Above all, chain newspapers can be independent
of advertisers in any given locality. A local newspaper in a chain can
be run at a loss, if necessary, until the advertisers break down and return
to the use of its space.

In short, newspaper publishers are not afraid of businessmen or in-
timidated by them. They are businessmen themselves and naturally
sympathize with the economic biases and social prejudices of other
businessmen, among them those who advertise in newspapers.

With the growing tension of the economic and social situation in the
ever more evident crisis of capitalism, liberalism is becoming much more
rare in American journalism. There are very few literally liberal news-
papers in the United States today — not a half-dozen leading dailies. And
many of the pseudo-liberal papers are such only because it is expedient,
in the light of the journalistic set-up in any given city, for them to be so.
Owners of several newspapers not infrequently conduct a liberal paper in
one city, where it pays them to be liberal, and maintain a conservative
paper in another and more reactionary municipality. The few genuinely
liberal newspapers have taken their stand because their publishers believe
that capitalism can be most certainly and effectively perpetuated by
bringing about necessary reforms in the capitalistic system. There is
scarcely a newspaper in the United States, save for the Communist Daily
Worker, which attacks the capitalistic system as a basic social institution.

500 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

There is not a powerful labor daily in the United States. The Daily
Worker, a Communist organ, is just as biased as the average capitalistic
journal. Labor dailies would find it difficult to secure remunerative
advertising. They would have to rely primarily upon circulation rev-
enue, and the limited income from this source would make it impossible
for a labor paper to duplicate the rich and varied offerings of our conven-
tional newspapers. Moreover, it is doubtful if laborers would even supr
ply any mass circulation of a strictly labor journal. The majority of
them would prefer to remain entertained by the traditional newspaper
which may, in policy, be vehemently opposed to the point of view and
interests of organized labor. In spite of the contrary dogmas of Karl
Marx, the American worker, like most other Americans, is more sus-
ceptible to entertainment and a play upon his emotions than to an appeal
to his economic interests.

It would be interesting to watch the experiment of an intelligent and
liberal editor who decided to cast conventions to the wind and run a
truly crusading newspaper. There are those who believe that such an
experiment could be financially successful. It is held that such liberal
papers as we have today merely go far enough with their liberalism
to annoy conservative advertisers, but do not take a sufficiently advanced
stand to arouse an enthusiastic support on the part of liberals and labor-
ites. It is believed that, if there is going to be any flirtation with liberal-
ism, it is better to go the whole way. There may be logic and truth in
this point of view, but we are not likely to find a liberal newspaper pub-
lisher or editor who possesses both the nerve and the resources to try
such an experiment in a thorough-going fashion. The New York tabloid,
PM, started out as a valiant left-wing liberal paper, but a financial crisis
quickly forced it to alter its policy and to dismiss most of its liberal staff.

In discussing the freedom of the press in our day, one must remember
the general character of our era. It is one in which the struggle is nar-
rowing down to a conflict between those who wish to overthrow the pres-
ent economic system and those who wish to preserve it. The majority of
the newspapers in the United States are lined up with the latter policy.
As the capitalistic system weakens, and comes into greater jeopardy, the
newspapers are likely to defend it more resolutely and to be less con-
genial to any expression of radical criticism.

When we talk about the freedom of the press in this country we mean
the freedom of the capitalistic press. Papers which openly advocate
revolution, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, have been ,
banned from the mails and the federal courts have upheld their suppres-
sion.

Americans make too much of our freedom of the press, as compared
with government censorship abroad. While it is true, as Secretary Ickes
has said, that the servitude of the American press is "voluntary servi-
tude," yet there is an enormous amount of this voluntary suppression of
news. It is probable that as great a proportion of the total news is ex-
cluded in the United States by voluntary newspaper action as is sup-

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 501

pressed by government orders in totalitarian countries. In this country,
the news which is suppressed is that which lacks mass appeal or is repug-
nant to the publishers, editors, and advertisers. Abroad, what is sup-
pressed is mainly material disapproved by the government. The cour-
ageous journalist, George Seldes, has built up an important weekly
publication, In Fact, which is devoted primarily to recording news which
has been suppressed, wholly or in part, by the conventional American
newspapers, or has been grossly distorted by them. Nevertheless it is a
considerable advantage for our newspapers to be able legally to print all
of the news if they wish to do so.

The freedom of the press had disappeared from the greater part of
Europe long before 1939. In some of the totalitarian states the govern-
ment actually ran the press, and in all of them it told the press what it
could publish.37

The whole question of freedom of the press in Britain before the
war broke out was surveyed in an admirable article on "Legal Restrictions
upon the British Press" in The United States Law Review, this being
a reprint of the comprehensive report by the Political and Economic
Planning Group in London. There was no open and overt censorship
of the press in England before 1939. This was invoked only in war time.
But the police could exercise an unofficial censorship, especially of small
and radical publications. For example, the police seized the copies
of a radical sheet for criticizing a foreign monarch, at the very moment
that they left unmolested the London Times, which was publishing letters
advocating the same monarch's assassination.

The freedom of the press in Britain was definitely curtailed by con-
tempt of court proceedings. This power to muzzle the press was so
vague, broad, and uncertain that newspapers did not know where they,
stood and, hence, tended to refrain from even reasonable and very desir-
able criticism of the administration of justice. Also, contempt proceed-
ings were extremely arbitrary because the court is always the plaintiff,
judge, jury, and witness in its own cause.

The British press was, like the American press, restricted by the
familiar legislation against blasphemy, obscenity, and libel. These re-
strictions were justified on the ground that they protected the public
morals and safeguarded the individual against defamation. There were
many nuisances associated with the restrictions in behalf of public morals,
but they were not significant in the way of crippling the freedom of the
press. Those restrictions relating to libel were, however, more serious.
They created a veritable paradise for gold-diggers and blackmailers.
There was a literal racket run by those who made a living out of
searching for possible libels, revealing them to the aggrieved persons,
bringing suit against newspapers, getting the case settled out of court, and
then splitting the damages collected. The fear of irresponsible juries has
prevented the newspapers from breaking up this racket.

37 See 0. W. Riegel, Mobilizing for Chaos, Yale University Press, 1934, pp. 155-156.

502 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

The more serious forms of menace to the freedom of the British press
before 1939 related to those restrictions upon criticizing the government
or publishing the full truth about governmental activities. The restric-
tions under the head of seditious libel curbed critics of the government
and social reformers. Those who criticized the government could be
arrested for inciting disaffection and disloyalty to government, while
reformers might be punished for promoting ill-will and hostility between
the different classes of His Majesty's subjects. At the same time, how-
ever, the partisans of the government were allowed to go to any extreme
in maligning the critics of government.

Especially dangerous to journalism were the restrictions growing out of
the taboo upon revealing official secrets. Ostensibly designed to protect
the government against espionage and the disclosure of state secrets, this
had been carried so far that the British press was even not allowed to say
anything about the concentration of the British navy in the eastern Medi-
terranean in the autumn of 1935.

Worst of all was the Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934. This
made it a crime to publish, or even to possess, anything which "might
seduce a member of His Majesty's forces from his duty or allegiance."
This made it literally criminal to publish or possess anything openly
advocating pacifism or revolution. It would actually have been possible
to imprison British subjects for possessing not only Quaker literature,
but even a copy of the New Testament. One printer actually refused
an order for a large number of Christmas cards because they carried the
admonition to "peace on earth and good-will to men."

The authors of this report concluded that "it is useless in present
European conditions to hope for relaxation" of any of these laws which
give the government a strangle-hold over the freedom and candor of the
British press. This conclusion proved prophetic, for when the second
World War broke out in 1939 government censorship was immediately
imposed on the British press.

As to the future conflict between the newspaper and the radio, this is
purely a matter of guesswork at present. Already, however, the radio
announcer has killed the journalistic "flash extra/7 But this has not
been a total loss to the newspapers, because the announcement of some
sensational news over the radio usually increases the sales of the next
editions of the newspapers, for the people want to read about such an
event in full. So far, the newspapers have been relatively safe from
radio competition, because the people have wanted a news medium which
they could consult at their convenience. But there has already been
made available for sale at a relatively low price a radio attachment
which will print the important news broadcasts as they are sent out over
the radio. These can be gathered together by the owner and read when-
ever he pleases. Just what effect the radio newspaper will have on the
future of printed journalism cannot be predicted.

Certain newspaper publishers have decided to take no chances and
have gone extensively into the radio business, although the radio field

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 503

had been rather thoroughly preempted by the National Broadcasting
Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System before the newspapers
awakened to the threat.37a There are now about 300 radio outlets linked
with newspapers. The newspapers also control some large local stations
affiliated with the big radio chains. The most serious result of radio
competition is the inroad of the radio into the newspaper advertising
revenue. A considerable portion of the total advertising budget, which
once went almost entirely to newspapers, is now being diverted to the
radio. Whereas the income from newspaper advertising dropped from
over 800 million dollars in 1929 to 525 million dollars in 1939, radio adver-
tising jumped from 40 million dollars in 1929 to 170 million dollars in
1939, and to 185 million dollars in 1940.

The Periodical Press

Periodical literature represents an important phase of contemporary
journalism. There were 7,124 periodicals published in the United States
in 1940. Most of these were trade papers and pulp magazines.38

Our magazines not only publish the shorter works of some of the most
important contemporary writers; they also furnish us with most of our
information about books and our judgments on them. Reputable maga-
zines, reflecting primarily the literary and social interests of capitalistic
society and the leisure class, were well established in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Representative of these are the Fortnightly Review, the Contem-
porary Review, the Nineteenth Century, the Revue des deux mondes, the
Deutsche Rundschau, The North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly,
Scribner's, Century, Harper's, and the Outlook, some of which have now
ceased publication. There are some very interesting and valuable peri-
odicals devoted almost exclusively to literary criticism and book-review-
ing, such as the London Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review of Litera-
ture, founded by Henry Seidel Canby. Iconoclastic criticism was
represented in such periodicals as the Smart Set, followed in a different
pattern and on a more pretentious scale by The American Mercury, both
magazines long edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.
Resolute political and social criticism have dominated the pages of the
Forum, the New Republic, the Nation, Common Sense, and a number of
other liberal periodicals. Advanced modernistic trends in literature have
found expression in such publications as the Dial and Hound and Horn.

Periodical literature has mirrored the economic currents in the contem-
porary scene. In Europe, especially in England, there are some staid
and respectable organs that reflect the interests of the agrarian aristoc-
racy, and the industrial oligarchy. But in the United States, especially
since the first World War, there have been few if any important periodi-
cals exclusively expressive of upper-class conservative opinion. The

37« See below, pp. 517-520.

38 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 3 Vols., Harvard University
Press, 1939.

504 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

Bookman took on such a cast for a time, but its circulation and influence
were limited. Even the Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's have published
much important material severely criticizing rugged individualism and
plutocracy. Likewise Fortune, a sumptuous monthly, created for exclu-
sive "class" circulation, has not hesitated at times to include material
as devastating as that which was called "muckraking" in the era of
Theodore Roosevelt, when carried in McClure's and other reformist
journals of that time. The closest to upper-class periodical literature
in the United States are such purely entertaining appeals to the leisure
class as Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Esquire. Here again, however,
the critical note has not been absent. Once mildly conservative periodi-
cals like the Forum 80 and Harper's Magazine became leading agencies of
social controversy and advanced liberal opinion. The lively American
Mercury was founded by Mencken and Nathan in 1923 as an antireform-
ist, antidemocratic magazine for the more cynical and detached members
of the leisure class, but after 1933, under the editorship of Charles Angoff,
it tended for a brief period to rival the Forum and Harper's in the zeal and
resolution with which it presented social, economic, and political criticism.
Under the current editorship of Eugene Lyons, it has combined the old
social criticism with Red-baiting and rabid interventionism, since 1940.
Such weekly periodicals as the Nation and the New Republic passed from
organs of liberalism to at least mild radicalism, while the New Masses
is frankly Communistic in tone. Critical humorous magazines enjoyed
wide popularity, among the leaders being Simplicissimus, Puck, Life, and
Judge.40

As is the case with liberal newspapers, the outlook for liberal periodicals
is not bright. The great majority of the formerly liberal periodicals
joined heartily in the crusade for a foreign war and developed an attitude
of intellectual dogmatism, arrogance, and intolerance, highly symptomatic
of proto-Fascism. They quickly found themselves in the inevitable
dilemma of fighting for domestic causes and internal reforms that war
and war preparations invariably curtail or suppress. Few of these jour-
nals learned the clear lesson taught by the first World War, namely, that
they cannot have their cake and eat it, too. They cannot logically expect
both to perpetuate social reform and live under a war economy and psy-
chology which ruthlessly oppose reform. and social justice.

With the decline of the editorial domination of American newspapers
and the growth of a mass appeal through sensational news, the intellectual
leadership in American journalism has assuredly passed from the news-
papers to periodical literature. Periodicals have, of late, very definitely
even invaded the newspaper realm. Certain magazines, of which Time
and Newsweek are the most notable examples, are really crisp and pun-
gent weekly newspapers in something like the tabloid format. They
provide a racy and cryptic summary of tlie more important news of the

89 The Forum is now incorporated in Current History.

40 Life and Judge have ceased publication. There is no high-class humorous
periodical in *he United States today.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 505

week, written in brilliant fashion and considerably above the intellectual
level of the average newspaper product. The enormous success of Time
shows that the American population not only appreciates the crisp mode
of presentation but also seemingly finds the news presented in the news-
papers so extensive and diffuse that it seeks an authoritative and readable
summary.

Periodicals have also aped the ideals and technique of the tabloid
and have sought to exploit the appeal made to the average reader by
visual imagery. Such magazines are devoted primarily to pictures with
explanatory text. These pictures present the more important news
developments of the current period in visual form. Ltfe, affiliated with
Time, has been the most notably successful of these. It built a circula-
tion running into the millions within a very short time. It has been
followed by Look, also very popular, and by other less creditable imita-
tors.

Great commercial magazines with a wide appeal and large advertising
revenue have flourished in the recent period, paralleling the rise of the
commercial newspaper. Such are the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's,
the American Magazine, the Cosmopolitan, Liberty, the Delineator, the
Woman's Home Companion, and the like. Their editorial courage and
social enlightenment have usually declined in proportion to their com-
mercial success. The zest for compactness and astute condensation has
given rise to the Reader's Digest and innumerable imitations. The
Reader's Digest publishes condensations of some of the best periodical
literature and popular books, along with many brief original articles. It
has gained an enormous popularity — the largest circulation of any pe-
riodical— and makes fabulous profits without resort to any commercial
advertising.

Monthly magazines represent the most numerous class of periodicals.
In 1940, they numbered 3,946 in the United States, as against 1,482
weeklies. Especially popular have been the women's magazines, nine
of which had a circulation, in 1930, in excess of a million a month. Five
of the general monthlies have each a circulation of more than 2,000,000.41
There are several agricultural journals which have a monthly circulation
of a million or more. The remarkable success of Time and Life has im-
proved the showing of the weekly periodicals in recent circulation gains.
The advertising income of national magazines is impressive. In 1935,
it was $123,093,000, and this was a considerable drop from the high of
1929.

Motion Pictures as a Factor in Communication

The motion picture shares with radio the distinction of being the unique
contribution of the twentieth century to the remarkable developments in
communication. The first public showing of a moving picture was pre-
sented on May 21, 1895. The motion picture was a result of advances

41 Saturday Evening Post has a circulation of 3,104,208; Colliers, 2,745,051;
Liberty, 2,358,661; American Magazine, 2,189,217; and True Story, 2,005,139.

506 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

in optics, the camera, and film. The elements of photography were dis-
covered by two Frenchmen, Louis Daguerre and Joseph Niepce, between
1826 and 1839, and extended in the next generation by W. H. Fox Talbot
in England and by J. W. Draper in the United States. But photography
could make little commercial headway until the celluloid film was pro-
duced at the end of the century. An important aid to the moving picture
was the kinetoscope of Thomas A. Edison and the projector of Thomas
Armat, invented in 1895. The first "movie" consisted in the rapid shift-
ing of a series of still pictures.

By 1900, crude movies of animated scenes, such as a train passing or a
Negro boy eating a watermelon, were produced. The first story movie
was turned out in 1905. It was made up of one reel of a thousand feet.
The technique of large-scale movie production was revolutionized by
D. W. Griffith, with his handling of massed actors and his use of the
"close-up," "cut-back," and "fade-out," These innovations were com-
bined in the film "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), which revolutionized
the movie art and inaugurated a movie industry.

The next advance was one that exploited popular personalities to
achieve mass appeal. This brought in the "star" system, first promoted
by Adolph Zukor. Such celebrities as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fair-
banks, Charlie Chaplin, Theda Bara, Clara Kimball Young and Bill Hart
established the popularity of star performers. The sound picture was
introduced in 1927 and helped to increase the following of the movies.
By 1930, the average weekly attendance at movies in the United States
was somewhere between 90 and 110 millions.

In addition to entertainment, the movies contribute an important
element to American information. The newsreels present a vivid visual
reproduction of events that have happened in various parts of the world
in the very recent past. Newsreels will probably make use of the recent
development whereby photographs are transmitted by cable and radio.
An audience in Kansas City may then see upon the screen in the evening
events that took place in Capetown, South Africa, the same morning.
Many excellent scientific films and medical films are produced.

The motion picture has not only provided new and diverting types
of entertainment and communication facilities, but has developed into
one of the major industries of the country. The average weekly attend-
ance at movies was estimated as 85 millions in 1939.42 It has been esti-
mated that, of this weekly movie-going population, around 25 millions
are minors. In 1940, there were approximately 17,000 motion picture
theaters available in the United States, seating 10,460,000 persons.
Many of these theaters are controlled by, or affiliated with, the big pro-
ducers of Hollywood, a practice developed under the leadership of Adolph
Zukor, with what many observers regard as disastrous results for the
quality of movie production and the freedom of exhibition.

42 Some authorities put it at only 70 millions. At any rate, movie attendance has
fallen off notably from its high of 1930, at around 100 million, a mattep which we
shall shortly consider.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 507

In 1939 the total investment in the motion picture industry in the
United States was estimated to be slightly over $2,000,000,000, having
grown from some 96 million dollars in 1921. The total value of Holly-
wood studio investment in 1939 was 117 million dollars. In 1939 some
130 motion picture studios in the country produced films valued, on
a production-cost basis, at 165 million dollars. Approximately 300,000
persons were employed in the industry in 1939, receiving some $410,-
760,000 in salaries and wages. Of this total, 32,000 were employed in
producing films. Some 760 feature pictures were released in 1939.
About 41,850 feature films and "shorts" have been produced in the
history of the American film industry. The film industry spent $80,000,-
000 for advertising in 1939. Some 22,000 advertisers used the films for
advertising and spent about $2,000,000 thereon. About $350,000,000
were paid in taxes by the film industry in 1939.

There has been a vast amount of waste and extravagance in the movies,
growing out of fantastic salaries to stars, large salaries for advisors and
consultants who frequently did nothing, extensive payments for movie
rights to books and plays which might or might not be used, and the like.
While the lavish "Birth of a Nation" cost Griffith only $100,000, Cecil B.
DeMille spent $2,300,000 on "The King of Kings," and Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer paid $4,000,000 for a half-interest in "Ben Hur." RKO is said
by Herbert Harris to have paid $300,000 to build a single stage-setting
for "Cain and Mabel." MGM paid Rachel Crothers $2,500 a week for 20
weeks and used one line she had written. Fox kept Philip Merivale under
contract at $1,000 a week for 11 months without using him in a single
film. In spite of these wastes and fabulous salaries paid to stars, such
as nearly $400,000 per annum to Mae West, the rank-and-file in movie-
dom are not well paid. The average income of this group on the Pacific
Coast is between $1,400 and $1,500 a year. The depression rendered
necessary the introduction of economies and better business methods, so
that in 1939 feature pictures were produced for an average cost of $300,-
000. Tremendous sums are, however, still spent on more spectacular
movies. "Gone With the Wind" cost over $4,000,000 to produce. Its
gross earnings were about $20,000,000. We present below an interest-
ing itemized account of the outlay for "Gone With the Wind." The
salaries paid to some stars still exceed the salaries of most leading busi-
ness executives in the United States.

As soon as the movie business became a major industry it became
involved in business consolidation and high finance. Eight giant movie
corporations dominate the film industry — Columbia, Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer, Radio-Keith-Orpheum, 20th Century-Fox, United Artists, Warner
Brothers, Paramount, and Universal. The great eastern banks — often
the same that are back of radio — gradually came into control. For ex-
ample, Paramount is controlled by the Public National Bank and Trust
Company of New York, Lehman Brothers, and certain affiliated banking
groups; 20th Century-Fox is an appendage of the Chase National Bank;
Stanley Brothers dominate Warner Brothers; Columbia is dominated by

COST SCHEDULE OF

"Gun WITH T

Salaries of Stars and Cast and Extra Talent , 466,688.00

Cameramen, wardrobe workers, property men, make-up artists, hairdressers, musicians,
copyists, transportation drivers, carpenters, grips, painters, plasterers, laborers,
electricians, projectionists, machinists, tractor drivers, prop-makers, drapers, uphol-
sterers, sound crew, special effects men , 961,215.00

Film cutters, assistant directors, unit managers, artists (set designers), scrip! clerks 119,433.00

Extras 108,469.00

Department heads, technical advisers, stenographers, watchmen, interior decorators, ward-
robe manufacturers, clerks, messenger boys, telephone operators 328,349.00

Total cost of Sets (as per detail below) 197,877.00

Exterior Atlanta Street $31,155 Interior Armory 3,397

Exterior and Interior Tara and Gardens 28,149 Exterior Twelve, Oaks — Barbecue Pits.. 2,764

Exterior and Interior Twelve Oaks. . . . 20,372 Interfor Melanie's House 2,714

Exterior and Interior Rhett's Home. . 17,035 Exlerior Road_E8Cape 2,449

Railway Station, Including Tracks and ^^ McDonough Road 2,083

Exre^rVeach^e'stVeVt:::;:::::::::: £S£ ******** u»

Interior Aunt Pitty's Home 7.236 Jump Sequence 1.145

Exterior of Church 5,573 Road to Twelve Oaks 1.070

Exterior and Interior Frank Kennedy's Exterior Shantytown 1.069

Store 3.991 Backings, Miniatures, Flats, etc 13,589

Interior Church Hospital 3,959 Miscellaneous Small Sets, etc. 22,603

Total cost of Women's Wardrobe. $ 98,154.00

Total cost of Men's Wardrobe 55.664.00

Total cost of Wardrobe 153,818.00

Projection cost 11.376.00

Picture Raw Stock (474,538 feet) cost 109,974.00

(Since the Technicolor process uses three negatives this total should be multiplied by
three to arrive at the total of 1,423,614 lineal feet of negative raw stock.)

Picture Negative developed (390,792 feet— 1,172,376 lineal feet) cost 23.448.00

and Picture Negative printed (272,658 feet) cost 33,701.00

Sound Track Raw Stock (535,000 feet) cost 5.511.00

Sound Track developed (221.303 feet) cost 2,213.00

and Sound Track Printed and reprints (232,885 feet) cost 8,150.00

Lighting cost, which includes Electricians, Equipment Rentals and Electric Power and

Supplies 134.497.00

It is estimated we used 1,000,000 board feet of lumber. Estimated cost 35.000.00

Cost of Research 9.987.40

The Transportation cost (Auto and Truck hire) was 59,917.00

location Expenses were 54.341.00

The cost of Props purchased, manufactured and rented was 90,758.00

The estimated cost of Music, which Includes the salaries of Lou Forbes, head of the Selznick
International Pictures' Music Department, and Secretary, Max Steiner, Musicians and

Copyists, also Miscellaneous License Fees and Supplies and Expenses $ 99,822.00

Price Paid for the Novel was $50,000, largest ever paid for a first novel.

Cost of the Search for Scarlett OUara has been computed by studio accountants at $92.000, of which

about 2/3 represents cost of screen tests.
Negative Cost of G.W.T.W. is computed at $3,957,000.
Fined computation of the production will be higher.

From Film Daily Yearbook, 1941.

508

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 509

Eastman, Dillon and Company and the California banking interests of
A. P. Giannini; and RKO is controlled by Lehman Brothers, Lazard
Frferes, the Atlas Corporation, and the Chase National Bank.48 One
of the more dramatic espisodes in this assumption of financial domina-
tion over the movies by the banks is unfolded by Upton Sinclair in his
book, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, which deals with a broader
field than the Fox movie interests.44

There has been the usual tendency toward concentration in the control
of motion picture theaters. Extensive chains of theaters have been
created and have either been merged with big producing companies or
definitely affiliated with them. By 1929, out of 533 motion picture
exchanges, some 444 were controlled by producers, and they handled
approximately 95 per cent of the total motion picture business. In
1929, the Allied States Association of Motion Picture Exhibitors was
created to protect independent exhibitors. It has done good work but
has not been able materially to reduce the control of the big producers
and chain theaters over motion picture distribution.

The sale of motion picture exhibition rights to theaters is still handled
by direct negotiation and bargaining. Producers can place their pictures
in their own chain of theaters, but they never produce enough pictures
to take up all the time of each theater. Therefore, the managers of
the latter must buy pictures from producers other than those who may
own or control the theater. Elaborate arrangements have been made
to protect local exhibitors against competition by the duplicate local
showing of any feature picture and to give the exhibitor a monopoly in
his locality, especially as regards the first showing of a picture. Pictures
have usually been distributed according to what is known as the "block
system," which had the advantage of allowing the exhibitor to buy a
year's supply of pictures in a few purchases. However, it often forced
an exhibitor to buy mediocre pictures which had little audience interest
and prevented him from buying others he preferred. Recently, under
government pressure, the studios have agreed to modify the block sales
system, limiting the number of sales in a block to five and giving the
exhibitor the privilege of viewing the pictures before buying.

American producers have sold movies extensively to Europe and other
foreign areas. Between 30 and 40 per cent of the revenue of some of the
largest producers was derived from foreign sales of their products before
the second World War broke out. This often produces some special
problems of censorship. For example, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer suppressed
the production of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, after it had
spent a large sum of money for movie rights and partial production.
It was feared that it might offend German Nazis and harm the German
market for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films. In this way, Herr Hitler and

43 On the business and financial aspects of moviedom, see Herbert Harris, "Snow
White and the Eight Giants," Common Sense, November, 1938, and January, Febru-
ary, 1939.

** Sinclair, 1933.

510 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

Dr. Goebbels were able indirectly to determine what movies may be
shown, even in the United States.

In the last few years there has been a marked falling off in movie
attendance. This may have been due, in part, to radio competition,
but the slump has been laid mainly to inferior movie production, and
the stultifying influence of movie censorship on the best movie art. Such
is the opinion, for example, of J. P. McEvoy, in an article in Reader's
Digest,™ "Fear over Hollywood." He believes the greed and ambition
of the movie producers started the trouble. They were not satisfied with
dominating the production field but started out to control the theaters
as well. Having built many theaters, they had to supply them with
pictures, but there was not sufficient talent available at any price to make
enough good pictures. Hence the producers had to make up the deficiency
by supplying inferior films, to the disgust of all save the more unintelli-
gent adults, and juveniles. The proportion of inferior films was further
increased by the introduction of double-features:

Adolph Zukor started the disastrous chain of events which led to block booking,
B pictures, and double features when, after cornering the star market, he set out
to ouy. build, or control all the theatres. Naturally, the other companies started
to outouy or outbuild Adolph. Result: Paramount at its peak owned or con-
trolled 1600 theatres; Fox 1000; Warners 600; Loew and RKO 200 apiece. Re-
sult : enough pictures, good, bad, or indifferent, had to be made to supply all these
theatres. Result : The necessity of making more than 600 feature-length pictures
a year. And there aren't that many good actors and directors or good stories.
How many good plays are there a year? Half a dozen. Good novels? Fifty?
Generous.

Saddled by a production curse grown out of real estate greed, Hollywood never
could have enough of any ingredient to supply it, except raw film. That comes
in by the carload, is run through the studio sausage mills, flavored with syn-
thetic comedy, drama, love and hooey, chopped into convenient lengths, and
shipped to some 17,000 theatres for the edification of some umpty-million cus-
tomers a week. . . .

Nobody in Hollywood wants double features. Theatre owners unanimously
oppose them. Women's clubs, parents, teachers, decry them. Your neighbor
hates them. So do you.

Then who likes them? The juvenile public that wants two lollipops for the
price of one. And ages 13 to 21 go to movies more than once a week, while the
people over that age, who form the bulk of the publication and are best able to
afford movies, support them the least.46

The solution of the problem, both financial and artistic, is to produce
better pictures, to attract the adult population. Juveniles will go any-
way. The improvement of pictures can be brought about, in part, by
reducing the output and giving more attention to fewer and better pic-
tures. But we shall never have as good pictures as might be made until
the curse of movie censorship is relaxed:

The cure is a drastic reduction of excess theatres and surplus pictures. There
is plenty of first-rate talent in Hollywood to make a limited number of good

45 January, 1941.

46 McEvoy, loc. cit., pp. 62-63. Courtesy of Reader's Digest and Stage Magazine.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 511

pictures. There is sufficient extraordinary talent to make a few extra-good
pictures.

But even this talent cannot function at its best until it is freed from a censor-
ship which puts a premium on the innocuous. Adult talent cannot make adult
pictures under a juvenile code. There is no more reason why all pictures should
be made for children than that all books, all art and music be under censorship
that boils everything down to an insipid infantile mush. A free screen is as
necessary to vital pictures as a free press is to vital literature. To each and
every minority pressure group hell bent on saving the movies from sin and suc-
ceeding only too well in sapping them of substance, Hollywood should cry out,
in the words of the distressed maiden, "Unhand me, villain." 47

For better or for worse, the movies are a social force we cannot ignore.
From the standpoint of communication and intellectual services, far
and away the most important contribution of the movies has been the
newsreel, travel films, educational films and the like. TKe newsreels
in making a showing of recent events possess the intellectual character
of the current newspaper material. They display the same tendency to
select the more sensational occurrences, with special stress upon military
events and natural calamities. Hence they are overweighted with mili-
tarism, patriotism and morbidity. Occasionally, they possess a consid-
erable educational value.

Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon some educational films.
One of the most remarkable of these was the film "The River," directed
and produced by Pare Lorentz.48 There are excellent travel films which
filter into general exhibition. Some educational films are rather daring
in their scope and import. Such was the evolution film some years ago
which featured Clarence Darrow and Professor H. M, Parshlcy. But
these educational films have a highly limited audience. Strictly educa-
tional films1 for use in the schools are becoming more numerous and better
in quality. They may ultimately revolutionize visual instruction.

So far as entertainment is concerned, one may conclude that, on the
whole, the movies, even at their worst, have provided a definite improve-
ment of the entertainment available to the masses in the pre-movie era.
The better movies are surely superior to the old-time vaudeville shows,
burlesque shows, and legitimate stage productions which the masses could
afford to attend. The great appeal of the movies to the masses is that it
provides an escape from the drabncss of everyday life. The patrons of
the movies identify themselves with the principals in the movie, project
themselves into the picture, and thereby enjoy a vicarious social and
intellectual adventure. The essential facts in this respect are well stated
by a former movie star, Milton Sills:

Just how does this form of amusement function as compensation to the drudg-
ing millions ? By providing a means of escape from the intolerable pressure and
incidence of reality. The motion picture enables the spectators to live vicariously
the more brilliant, interesting, adventurous, romantic, successful, or comic lives

47 Ibid., pp. 64-65.

48 On this phase of movie development, see Paul Rotha, The Documentary Film,
Norton, 1940.

512 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

of the shadow figures before them on the screen. . . . The film offers them a
Freudian journey into made-to-order reverie, reverie by experts. Now reverie
may be unwholesome — our psychological studies are still too immature to decide
this question — but in our present form of culture it seems to be necessary. In
any case, reverie engendered by motion pictures is certainly more wholesome
than that engendered by the corner saloon or the drab walls of a tenement house.
For an hour or two the spectator identifies himself with the hero or heroine;
potential adventurer at heart, he becomes for the moment an actual imaginative
adventurer in a splendid world where things seem to go right.40

Because of this widespread identification of the observer with the ideals
and personages in the film, it is important that the mental excursion
should not be too anti-social in its fundamental import, especially in view
of the fact that about one fourth of the movie patrons are children. The
broad implications of motion pictures with respect to social attitudes
and social values have been summarized by Professors Willey and Rice:

Although the motion picture is primarily an agency for amusement, it is no
less important as an influence in shaping attitudes and social values. The fact
that it is enjoyed as entertainment may even enhance its importance in this
respect. Any discussion of this topic must start with a realization that for the
vast audience the pictures and "filmland0 have tremendous vitality. Pictures
and actors arc regarded with a seriousness that is likely to escape the casual
observer who employs formal criteria of judgment. Editors of popular motion
picture magazines are deluged with letters from motion picture patrons, un-
burdening themselves of an infinite variety of feelings and attitudes, deeply per-
sonal, which focus around the lives and activities of those inhabiting the screen
world. One editor receives over 80,000 such letters a year. These are filled
with self-revelations which indicate, sometimes deliberately, often unconsciously,
the influence of the screen upon manners, dress, codes and matters of romance.
They disclose the degree to which ego stereotypes may be moulded by the stars
of the screen. Commercial interests appreciate the role of the motion picture as
a fashioner of tastes, and clothes patterned after the apparel of popular stars,
and for which it is known there will be a demand, are manufactured in advance
of the release of the pictures in which these stars will appear. Names and por-
traits of moving picture actors and actresses have also been extensively used for
prestige purposes in the advertisements ' of various commodities.

While it is the dramatic subjects that are of major interest in the study of the
motion picture, the news reel also has won popular favor. With its subjects
selected from a wide range of events that might be filmed, it presumably plays
a part in inculcating values, althqugh its role has never been adequately studied.

It is because of its influence in shaping attitudes and inculcating values and
standards that there has been widespread discussion of motion picture censor-
ship. On one hand are those urging extreme control, and on the other those
who seek unfettered development. Because of variation in local standards, it is
extremely difficult to establish a common basis for film eliminations where censor-
ship exists. Not infrequently producers must cut pictures after production at
considerable expense to meet local requirements. In attempts to avoid this,
censorship within the industry has developed in the National Board of Review.
The need for thoroughgoing study of the social effects of the motion picture seems
clear.50

The organization which has interested itself most directly in the intel-
lectual, social and moral aspects of pictures has been the Motion Picture

49 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 11, p. 67.
*° Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. I, pp. 209-210.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 513

Research Council. Beginning in 1929, it was able to make use of the
resources of the Payne Fund, an endowment interested in the reaction of
motion pictures, radio and the like upon children. A series of investiga-
tions were made between 1929 and 1933 by such competent scholars as
Mark A. May, Herbert Blumer, and Frederic M. Thrasher. The results
of these studies were summarized and digested by Herbert James Forman
in an important book, Our Movie-made Children.

The facts uncovered indicate clearly that motion pictures have assumed
so large a part in the social attitudes and life of the nation that they
require social inspection and regulation, though probably of a far different
sort from that which now dominates motion picture censorship. Professor
Blumer discovered that American children are now primarily movie-
minded in their mental imagery. Contrary to popular impression, chil-
dren do not forget what they have seen on the film as soon as they leave
the picture theater. It has been estimated that they carry away from
a picture more than half as many impressions as the average adult.
Thurstone and Peterson found that movies have a very definite influence
in altering and fixing the mental attitudes of children. Their ideas and
practices in regard to life responsibilities, love-making, adventure, and
moral ideals are deeply influenced by movie plots and portrayals. Over-
exciting pictures lead to serious disturbance of the sleep of children.

Blumer and Hauser clearly revealed the fact that movies may fre-
quently stimulate delinquency and immorality. The glamorous portrayal
of crime, the desire to get easy money and have fine clothes, or the allure-
ment of adventure and excitement, incites those who live under drab
circumstances to imitate the methods followed in the movies to secure
wealth, excitement, leisure, and romance. This is particularly the case
with girls. While the movies usually attempt to point a moral and wind
up with the conclusion that "you can't win" in crime, there are plenty
of characters in the films who seem to get away with it. A typical ex-
ample of the way in which the movies may promote anti-social conduct
is revealed by the following story of a seventeen-year-old girl who was
held as a sexual delinquent:

I would love to have nice clothes and plenty of money and nothing to do but
have a good time. When I see movies of that type, it makes me want to get
out and go somewhere where things happen. Like the picture, "Gold-diggers of
Broadway." The girls were nothing but adventuresses and look what great times
they had. I always wanted to live with a girl chum. I saw many pictures
where two or three girls roomed together. It showed all the fun they had. I
decided I would, too. I ran away from home and lived with my girl friend, but
she was older than I and had different ideas, and of course she led me and led
me in the wrong way.51

Of course, there is another side to the matter. If the movies are able
to exert a profound influence upon the mentality of children they may
exert a good as well as a bad effect. Certain pictures stimulate the
ambition for study and travel, others promote an intensification of family

51 Forman, op. cit., Macmillan, 1933, p. 219.

514 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

affection; some teach better manners and greater ease in personal conduct.
As to whether the net social and moral influence of the movies today is
on the good or bad side of the ledger, no one can say with any dogmatism.
But certainly the facts justify the following statement by Professor W. W.
Charters, to the effect that the movies exert a powerful influence on the
mentality of American children. He contends that:

Tho motion picture is powerful to an unexpected degree in affecting the infor-
mation, attitudes, emotional experiences and conduct patterns of children; that
the content of current commercial motion pictures constitutes a valid basis for
apprehension about their influence upon children; and that the commercial
movies present a critical and complicated situation in which the whole-hearted
and sincere cooperation of the producers with parents and public is essential to
discover how to use motion pictures to the best advantage of children.52

In conclusion, one may say that, when compared to many other forces
and factors in American life, motion pictures are nothing to get highly
excited about as a force for either good or evil. They have presented an
unusually varied type of entertainment, at prices far below anything
imaginable in the old-time theater and accessible to an infinitely larger
group of patrons. While the movies have undoubtedly incited to crim-
inality and delinquency in many cases, they have taken many more
persons from streets, saloons, gambling dens and dance halls and put them
in the movie theaters. This has certainly been an intellectual and moral
advance. We can hardly expect the movies, as at present constituted and
controlled, to be a force for social progress. We can only thank God
that an occasional mental jolt sneaks by the censors. We may look
forward to a society in which the mass experience of social well-being
will not have to be a vicarious mental flight in a movie theater. But
until this time arrives the movies will undoubtedly supply important relief
for the millions condemned to live under drab circumstances and with
entirely inadequate standards of living.

The Radio in Modern Life

The radio or wireless telephony has been a natural outgrowth of the
scientific discoveries and electro-magnetic theories which made possible
Marconi's invention of the wireless telegraph. De Forest, Fessenden,
Poulsen, and Colpitts made an application of these electrical theories to
the transmission of the human voice over long distances without the
necessity of a material conductor. In the form that it assumed, as a
result of the work of the above scientists and engineers, the wireless tele-
phone has already gone far toward revolutionizing the methods of long-
distance communication of information through the direct transmission
of the human voice. A revolutionary development in radio has come
about since 1939, in what is known as "frequency modulation," a device

52Forman, pp. cit., p. viii. On the other hand, Raymond Moley, in his book,
Are We Movie-Made? Macy-Masius, 1938, vigorously maintains that moving pic-
tures have relatively little permanent influence over the minds of either children or
adults,

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 515

invented by Edwin H. Armstrong and others, which produces for the first
time a staticless radio. There are already some forty "FM" stations,
eleven of them commercial, and this type of broadcasting and reception
will probably come to dominate the radio industry in the near future.

Aside from its commercial and recreational uses, radio has already
demonstrated its social usefulness in such forms as transoceanic telephone
messages, communication with remote and inaccessible points, radios in
police automobiles, and radio control of airplane travel.

The relation of wireless telephony to the development of the radio is
well understood and generally taken for granted. But we are less aware
of the degree to which the radio, at least radio broadcasting, depends
upon the wire telephone:

It is to the telephone, not to radio, that we owe the development of the equip-
ment whereby speech and music are made available for broadcasting.

More than this, it is the telephone wire, not radio, which carries programs the
length and breadth of the country. John Smith, in San Francisco, listens on a
Sunday afternoon to the New York Philharmonic orchestra playing in Carnegie
Hall. For 3,200 miles the telephone wire carries the program so faithfully
that scarcely an overtone is lost; for perhaps 15 miles it travels by radio to enter
John Smith's house. And then he wonders at the marvels of radio.

But what about programs from overseas? Here indeed wireless telephony
steps in, but not broadcasting in the ordinary sense. The program from London
is telephoned across the Atlantic by radio, but on frequencies entirely outside of
the broadcast band.53

When we think of radio we ordinarily have in mind the broadcasting
and reception of programs of entertainment or education. We often
overlook a very important phase of radio, namely, commercial communi-
cation by means of radio telegraphy and radio telephony. In this field
of commercial communication by wireless there were in the United States,
in 1937, 1,154 point-to-point telegraph stations, and 132 point-to-point
telephone stations which were licensed by the Federal Radio Commission
to extend fixed public service, including use by the press. These were
operated by some 11 different companies. Facilities existed for communi-
cation between the United States and 53 foreign countries by means of
radio telephone stations. Through wire line extensions these provided
contact with 92 per cent of the telephones existing in the world. As early
as 1927, -some 3,777,538 wireless telegraph messages were transmitted by
commercial companies in the United States. The number has increased
since, 8,042,535 messages having been sent in 1937.

The commercial use of the wireless telephone began in the United States
about 1925, and the first commercial service was opened between New
York and London on January 7, 1927. Some 6 million dollars worth ol
business was transacted during the first day of its operation, and there
were many personal calls made as well. Our wire telephone facilities are
so extensive and efficient in this country that there is no particular need

53 H, A. Bellows, Technological Trends and National Policy, p. 221, Government
Printing Office, 1937.

516 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

for any elaborate development of domestic wireless telephony. Never-
theless a considerable number of messages are sent each day. In 1937,
there were 132 radio telephone stations in the United States and 147,596
completed revenue calls were made in that year in the domestic and for-
eign service combined. As important as the public use of the radio
telephone is its employment in police and aviation services. It is im-
portant for the former and indispensable for the latter. Wireless teleph-
ony is also highly important for maintaining connection with moving
vessels at sea and in inland waters.

The major development of the radio industry has taken place, however,
in radio manufacturing and distribution and in the broadcasting field.
The development of the radio industry in the decade of the 'twenties was
one of the outstanding new industrial booms of that notable era/'4 The
sales of radio sets and other accessory equipment rose from 2 million
dollars in 1920 to the high of $842,548,000 in 1929. About 630 million
dollars was spent for this purpose in 1939, and it is estimated that the
total expenditures for radio sets and equipment from 1920 to 1940 has
been in excess of 4% billion dollars. In 1941, approximately 50 million
radio sets were owned in the United States. The most notable recent
innovation in radio sales has been radio sets for automobiles. About
8 million automobile sets were in use by 1941.

The total investment in the radio industry as a whole (exclusive of
radio sets), including broadcasting, was about 525 million dollars in 1941.
In 1940, about 255,000 persons were regularly employed in the whole radio
industry, with an annual payroll of approximately 360 million dollars.
The radio statistics for 1940 indicate a substantial growth of the radio
manufacturing industry. Some 1,064 establishments were engaged in the
manufacture of radios, radio apparatus, and phonographs, employing
75,000 persons, with an annual payroll of 80 million dollars and an annual
product valued, at wholesale prices, at around 300 millions. Some
11,750,000 radio sets were sold, at a total retail value of 400 millions.
The notable growth of the radio manufacturing industry between 1933
and 1940 may be seen in the fact that the total retail value of the product
in 1933 was 122 million as against 400 million dollars for 1940. Radio
distributors and dealers represented the largest single element in the radio
industry. They had an investment of some 350 million dollars, a gross
revenue of 600 millions, 150,000 employees, and a payroll of 225 million
dollars.

In 1941, some 883 commercial broadcasting stations had a gross rev-
enue of 185 million dollars from the sale of time and other incidental serv-
ices. Some 20,000 persons were regularly employed, and at least 25,000
more were employed on part time. The total payroll was 50 million
dollars. In 1941, there was a total investment in the broadcasting indus-
try of over 80 millions. The income of 185 million dollars was thus

54 See, especially, J. M. Herring and G. C. Gross, Telecommunication: Economics
and Regulation, McGraw-Hill, 1936.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 517

over twice the total investment in the physical plant of the industry.
The net profits of the National Broadcasting Company were $5,800,000,
and of the Columbia Broadcasting System, $7,400,000, which in each case
represented over 75 per cent of their investments in tangible property.
The tables on pages 518 and 519 give a comprehensive summary of the
radio industry, as of 1940.

Since advertisers wish to present their sales material to as large an
audience as possible, only chains, with a large number of stations under
their control, can bring about this desired result. Local stations can,
however, perform a useful service in the matter of purely local advertising.
The value of the radio to advertisers may be discerned from the fact that
the National Broadcasting Company has been able to charge as high as
$15,000 an hour for the use of its system.

Even more than is true of the movies, the ownership and control of the
radio industry of the United States are concentrated in a few large com-
panies, of which the Radio Corporation of America is far and away the
most important. The Radio Corporation (RCA) is really a subsidiary of
the General Electric Company. The latter organized RCA as a Delaware
corporation in 1919 to get an outlet for its basic radio patent, the Alex-
anderson alternator. In 1920-21 an arrangement was entered into be-
tween RCA, General Electric, Western Electric, Westing-house, and
A.T.&T., permitting all of them to use the basic patents owned by each.
Behind all of these electric and radio companies stand the great New York
banks, especially the Rockefeller Chase National Bank and the Morgan
interests. The Radio Corporation controls many of the basic patents
connected with both the manufacture of radio sets and radio broadcast-
ing apparatus. It has an extensive industry in the way of manufacturing
radio sets, and also dominates the broadcasting field through its owner-
ship of the National Broadcasting Company. It has an important hold
on theaters and amusement enterprises through its control of the Radio-
Keith-Orpheum Corporation. The chief figures connected with the early
business organization of the American radio industry and RCA were
Owen D. Young and David Sarnoff. The latter is to radio what T. N.
Vail was to the business, organization of American telephony and teleg-
raphy.

Inasmuch as the initial period of radio development fell in the decade
of the 'twenties, RCA was caught up in the grip of the speculative finance
capitalism of that era, and there was particularly wild speculation in the
common stock of RCA in 1928-29. Few other important stocks ex-
perienced such a tremendous shift of paper values before and after the
crash of 1929. There are many small companies engaged in the manu-
facture of radio sets, but they are in part dependent upon RCA's control
of the patents governing the manufacture of many radio essentials.

The concentration of control in broadcasting manifests an extreme
hardly matched in any other American industry. American broadcast-
ing is dominated by the National Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary
of RCA, by the Columbia Broadcasting System, and by the more re-

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cently created Mutual Broadcasting System. These three giants are
at least loosely affiliated through underlying banking control and certain
common amusement interests. The NBC System controls some 223
stations, and the Columbia System has control of about 123. Mutual
controls 168 stations but they are not usually as important as the NBC
and Columbia stations. The dominance of these three in the broadcast-
ing world is brought about by their control over the best air channels
which may be used for broadcasting programs even more than as a result
of the large number of stations they dominate. As we shall see, the new
regulations of the Federal Communications Commission in the spring
of 1941 sought to undermine the grip of NBC and CBS on the radio
broadcasting situation. How well the FCC will succeed in this aim re-
mains to be seen.

Now there is a great advantage in this concentration of radio power
and efficiency. It certainly insures better programs. But this should
not be gained at the expense of the freedom of opinion. Thus far, there
is no adequate guaranty that the latter can be secured and will be pro-
tected. The independents are pitifully impotent and inconsequential.
The matter rests in the hands of the NBC and the other chains. Essen-
tially, it comes down to NBC and Columbia policy. There is only one
independent station in the country frankly devoted to the presentation of
the point of view of labor and radicalism, namely, Station WEVD, made
possible by a gift from the American Fund for Public Service.

As radio grew in popularity, chaos was threatened through crossing
and confusion of programs. There was no adequate regulation of the
hours, power, and frequencies used by broadcasting stations. In Febru-
ary, 1927, President Coolidge signed the Radio Act, which created the
Federal Radio Commission. This consisted of five members, appointed
for a term of six years by the President. It was given power to regulate
the use of air channels, to assign wave-lengths, to control the increase of
radio facilities and the establishment of new stations, to license all
broadcasting stations, and to have charge of engineering regulations
related to transmission. It was given little or no direct control over the
programs which are broadcast. In 1934, the Communications Act was
parsed, which supplanted the Federal Radio Commission by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), with practically the same powers
as those possessed by its predecessor.

The broadcasting stations are classified according to the type of service
they render, whether local, regional, or national. The appropriate
amounts of power are assigned to the various stations, according to their
class, and they are authorized to operate on frequencies compatible with
th^ type of service and the licensed power of each station. On March 29,
1941, the government assigned new frequencies to 795 out of the 883
standard broadcasting stations of the country.

Perhaps the least defensible phase of the FCC policy has been its
reluctance to grant reasonably long licenses to the broadcasting stations.
Although the 1927 law permitted the granting of licenses for a period of

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 521

five years and the law of 1934 for three years, not until 1939 were licenses
granted for more than a six-month period. Since 1939 they haye been
extended to one year. This is manifestly unfair, since stations must
often make contracts running over several years, especially in making
payment for expensive equipment. So long as this policy continues,
broadcasting must remain a gamble rather than a* sound investment.
Licenses have rarely been revoked or reasonable requests for new licenses
refused, but the possibility of such action always exists.

When James Lawrence Fly became chairman of the FCC in 1939
the Commission evidently determined to lessen the alleged monopolistic
domination of radio broadcasting by the National Broadcasting Company
and the Columbia Broadcasting System. One evidence of this was the
greater liberality in granting licenses to new stations. In the previous
17 years, only 750 stations had been licensed. Since 1939 about 130
new stations have been licensed. Far more drastic was the adoption of
eight new regulations by the FCC in the spring of 1941, which directly
aimed at curtailing the control of NBC and CBS over the broadcasting
industry. Especially important were the regulations making it illegal
for one company to own two national networks, those seeking to prevent
special favoritism to stations affiliated with great networks, and that
which outlawed collusion in rate-fixing between an individual station and
a network. Specifically, the FCC announced that it would not, after a
period of 90 days, license any station that:

(1) Has any contract, arrangement or understanding, express or implied, with
a network organization under which the station is prevented or hindered from, or
penalized for, broadcasting the programs of any other network organization.

(2) Has ,any arrangement preventing or hindering another station in the same
area from broadcasting the network's programs not taken by the former station.

(3) Has had a network contract of affiliation for a period of more than one
year.

(4) Has a network contract requiring it to give up programs already scheduled
in order to air a network show.

(5) Has a network contract restraining its right to reject programs.

(6) Is owned by or controlled by a network serving substantially the same
area.

(7) Is affiliated with a network organization which maintains more than one
network.

(8) Has a contract which prevents, hinders or penalizes it from fixing or alter-
ing its rates for the sale of broadcast time for other than the network's programs.

These new restrictions provoked a storm and bitter controversy. The
new regulations were violently assailed by NBC and CBS and were
warmly defended by the Mutual Broadcasting Company, which stood to
gain by cutting down the "monopoly" of NBC and CBS.55

The fact that Mutual vigorously upholds the new regulations seems
to indicate that they do not threaten radio. What they may threaten
are the special services which NBC and CBS have given without sponsors

55 See "What the New Radio Rules Mean," Columbia Broadcasting System, May
17, 1941; and "Mutual's White Paper," Mutual Broadcasting System, June, 1941.

522 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

with some of the large profits which their near monopoly of the air has
enabled them to earn. These include much of the important musical and
educational material on the air. All that the impartial observer can
do is to wait and note the results of the new regulations in operation over
a period of some years. The same legalistic legerdemain which has nulli-
fied most other government efforts to undermine monopoly may be
brought into play to preserve the control of the great networks over
radio. The crisis and test in these new regulations were modified or post-
poned by amendments adopted by the FCC on October 11, 1941. The
main features of these amendments were the following:

1. The original regulations completely prohibited network option-time. The
amendments make liberal provision for option-time up to a total of 12 hours
daily (3 hours in each of 4 "segments" into which the day is divided), subject only
to common-sense restrictions designed to prevent the stifling of competition.

2. The original regulations fixed the maximum period for network-affiliate
contrasts at one year, with an advance period for negotiation of only 60 days.
The amendments increase these periods to 2 years and to 120 days respectively.
At the same time, the license period for standard broadcast stations is increased
from one year to 2 years.

3. The original regulations prohibited operation of more than one competing
network by one network company. The amendments indefinitely postpone the
effective date of this prohibition, but do not eliminate it.

4. With respect to existing contracts, arrangements or understandings, or net-
work organization station licenses, the amendments postpone the effective date
to November 15, 1941.56

The big broadcasting chains appealed to the courts, and at the present
writing the fate of the new FCC regulations has not been decided.

Far more ominous than such federal regulation is the trend towards
government censorship of radio programs. We shall consider the problem
of radio censorship more thoroughly later on in this book, but a word may
profitably be said on the subject at this time. The short-period licensing
procedure very definitely holds an axe over the head of the stations, and
the FCC has not been loath to remind stations of this fact, sometimes for
trivial causes. The most notorious instance was when the FCC threat-
ened to revoke, or to fail to renew, the licenses of NBC and affiliated
stations because of the innocuous Mae West-Charley McCarthy broad-
cast in December, 1937. Early in 1941, Station WAAB in Boston was
compelled to agree to conform to government policy and ideas before its
license would be renewed. After the summer of 1940, the government
made it increasingly evident that it frowned on broadcasts supporting
non-intervention in the European war. Thoroughgoing censorship of
broadcasting was imposed a few days after Pearl Harbor, a censorship
which extended even to the broadcasting of weather reports.

The size of the radio audience has been estimated by experts as run-
ning somewhere between 40 and 70 million persons daily. Willey and
Rice estimate that more than 8 out of every 10 sets owned in the United

5*Mutual's Second White Paper, Mutual Broadcasting System, October 20, 1941,
p. 2.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 523

States are used at some time during each day, about half of the total
sets being in use when the most popular programs are on the air. By far
the greatest use of radio sets comes between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. In 1938,
the National Association of Broadcasters estimated that approximately
27 million families in the United States owned about 37 million radio
receiving sets; that approximately 75 per cent of these are turned on at
some time each day; and that each set operates on an average 5.1 hours
daily. The popularity of radio programs can be measured to some degree
by fan mail, about 20 million letters being received annually from radio
listeners. NBC received 4,703,321 letters in 1937. One single address
on a religious subject over the Columbia Network brought in no less than
438,000 letters. An interesting sidelight upon the mental level of fan
mail is to be seen in the fact that the astrologer, Evangeline Adams,
received more fan mail in a single week than President Hoover did in the
week after his election to the Presidency in 1928. Telephone calls to
stations are also an indication of public response to programs.

The social and intellectual significance of the radio can hardly be over-
estimated. Even as early as 1931, W. F. Ogburn was able to list no less
than 150 different effects of radio upon American society.57 It has
brought an enormous extension of public education, mass entertainment,
propaganda, and misinformation. The events and thoughts of the world
are made available to nearly every household in the land. But the ma-
terial is pretty well filtered through a prolonged process of selection, so
that the product actually presented tends to be of a traditional character
and to uphold the present order. In Russia, the radio is equally devoted
to propaganda in behalf of revolution, collectivism, and the totalitarian
state. A conservative and capitalistic radio station in Russia is even
more rare than a radical station in the United States.

The influence of radio news commentators in shaping public opinion
is constantly increasing, especially since the Munich Conference and the
outbreak of the European war in 1939. The broadcasters are rapidly
usurping the position once held by powerful editorial writers in the edi-
torial stage of American journalism. Broadcasters like H. V. Kaltenborn,
Raymond Gram Swing, Elmer Davis, and Upton Close exert an influence
on public opinion comparable to that once exerted by Horace Greeley
and Charles Dana. They are supposed merely to give the news, but, as
their very title of "commentator" implies, they not only comment on the
news but edit it as severely as any editor in the days of pre-commercial
journalism. This makes it difficult to get unbiased news reporting over
the radio. Some broadcasters make few comments on the news, but
this is not true of the leading figures on the air today. And the radio
audience selects its favorite commentator, as the reading public used to
select its editor and newspaper — because it likes a particular bias or slant
on public affairs. If unpopular or minority attitudes had anything like
an equal chance to be heard over the air, radio would be of vast impor-

57 Recent Social Trends, Vol. I, pp. 153-156.

524 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

tance in the preservation of democratic society. But the radio authorities
are even more sensitive to popular opinion and governmental suggestions
than are newspaper publishers.68

After the European war broke out in 1939, increasing use was made of
radio by governments in waging a propaganda war. In addition to
warring against each other over the air, both sides strove ardently to
influence American opinion.59

Nothing in American life is more varied than the programs presented by
radio broadcasting companies. The offering is even more diversified than
that which comes to us through the movies and the newspapers. But
through most of it there runs one common ideal and requirement, namely,
that there must be mass appeal. This means rather general banality.
This sentiment was expressed by a president of the National Broadcasting
Company when he said that "in broadcasting we are dealing with a mass
message, and the material delivered must be suitable for mass consump-
tion." The same considerations dominate here that operate in connection
with the attempt of newspapers to get a large circulation.

The radio broadcasting industry depends for its income almost entirely
upon advertising, which brings in nearly $200,000,000 yearly. And
advertisers naturally want to present their sales talk to as large an audi-
ence as possible. For this reason, the broadcasting companies have a par-
ticularly acute regard for material which will appeal to a large audience.
They are not especially concerned with the intellectual or esthetic
quality of the entertainment, provided it is surely safe and popular. Only
on a sustaining program, namely, one presented by the station without
any compensation, can we normally expect any program of a specially
high-grade quality — one which overlooks to some slight degree the tastes
of the mass of listeners. Sustaining and advertising programs divide
about equally the total radio time on the majority of stations, but adver-
tising programs, especially serials, dominate during the daytime. Of the
advertising programs, about one fifth of the time is devoted to sales talk
and four-fifths to some kind of entertainment.

Taking the broadcasting material as a whole, it runs the whole gamut
from the sublime to the ridiculous to a degree which, perhaps, exceeds the
variation in the movies. At one extreme, we have the Town Meeting
of the Air and comparable educational broadcasts of a very high order.
At the other, we run into the abysmal depths of "soap opera," and the ex-
traordinarily banal and unreal dramatic serials presented during the day
for the diversion of bored and frustrated housewives. These serials now
take up 84.9 per cent of all commercially sponsored time. Their charac-
ter has been well described by Whitfield Cook, in an article on "Be Sure
to Listen In," in The American Mercury, March, 1940; and by Thomas

68 For a critical and an official appraisal of radio broadcasts and public opinion,
see Arthur Garfield Hays, "Civic Discussion over the Air/* in Annals of the American
Academy, January, 1941, pp. 37-46; and William S. Paley, "Broadcasting and Ameri-
can Society," Ibid., pp. 62-38.

59 See Harold N. Graves, Jr., "War on the Short Wave," Foreign Policy Associa-
tion, May, 1941.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 525

Wood, in an article on "My Morning with Radio," in Scribner's Com-
mentator, January, 1941. Mr. Cook summarizes his impressions, which
would probably be shared by most literate listeners, as follows:

Now I know all. I have heard the worst. For I have listened for ten con-
consecutive daylight hours to life's sorrows according to the gospel of Bi-So-Dol,
Pillsbury, Camay, and Kix. And let me tell you, it almost got me down. . . .

I investigated and discovered that there are no less than sixty-live five-day-a-
woek serials on daytime programs of the four major stations in the New York
area. Then I knew I'd have to listen to those sixty serials. They use up eighty-
two and a half hours per week — almost a third of the total number of daytime
hours of WEAF, WOR, WJZ, and WABC. During an average week, only about
eighteen day-time hours are devoted to serious music, for instance, and perhaps
twenty-five hours to news. . . .

The heroines continued to be simple, upright and ready to give advice at the
drop of a hat. And Life continued to hand them raw deals. They were always
brave, of course. I began to long for just one little miss who might suspect
that rain was rain and not violets. And why was there so little humor in these
sentimental capsules? Whenever any light comedy was attempted to relieve the
gloom, it sounded like second-rate Noel Coward rewritten by Kathleen Norris.
Always life was real and life was earnest. About as real and earnest as it used
to be iri dime novels. . . .

Will the listener ever recover from this terrific strain? Can he go on with
his life after this terrible revelation? Will he ever be the same again? Is the
great big radio audience happy? Is Bab-0 happy? And Ivory? and Crisco,
Super Suds, and Kix? And what do the children learn from it all? And the
ghost of Marconi?

Be sure to listen in each week day. And see your psychiatrist twice a year! 60

The problems of life are combed over by broadcasters, running all the
way from professional psychoanalysts to the "Voice of Experience." In
music, we find everything from a concert of the New York Philharmonic
Orchestra, or a performance of the Metropolitan Opera Company, to
recorded offerings of the cheapest jazz and swing music. Astrologers
vend their antique superstitions along with international broadcasts on
modern astrophysics by Sir James Jeans. Millions are brought within
earshot of championship prizefights, world series baseball games, star
football contests, the Kentucky Derby, and the like. Nothing like the
radio has ever happened before to jar mankind out of isolation and to end
the inability of the poor man to participate personally in direct enjoyment
of the more thrilling events in the world of sport and entertainment.
As Kenneth G. Bartlett puts it:

The obvious thing is that radio is the greatest user of entertainment material
since the world began. Every program is a part of the passing parade. It has
changed the environment in which we live, and because it is so complex it seems
to add to the total confusion. It seems to call for minds that can sort fact from
fiction, values from passing fancies. It requires a strong "discount factor" and a
better knowledge of the medium so that the listener may the more accurately
appraise radio's contribution to twentieth-century living.61

60 Cook, loc. cit., pp. 314-315, .

61 K. G. Bartlett, "Trends in Radio Programs," Annals of the American Academy,
January, 1941, p. 25. For a survey of current radio entertainment, see ibid., pp. 2&~
30. f

526 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

While by all odds the greater portion of radio broadcasting time is
consumed with matters of "entertainment/7 the educational opportunities
are truly remarkable for those who are really interested and make a
careful study of the offerings.02 It is doubtless true that a discerning
and discriminating use of the radio in any large city in any given week
would provide far more educational material than any student would be
likely to obtain from the same period of attending university lectures.
Special attention is given to science, health talks, travel, and literature.
Several excellent forums exist for the discussion of scientific problems
and the "great books" as well as current literature. Not much of value
in the social sciences is presented, for this field is too "controversial,"
and radio seeks to avoid the controversial, or at least the progressive side
of controversial topics.

Of the various social and intellectual influences exerted by the radio,
Willey and Rice have selected for special emphasis the tendency toward
cultural leveling and the breaking down of caste and isolation:

Certain it is that the radio tends to promote cultural levelling. Negroes barred
from entering universities can receive instruction from the same institutions by
radio; residents outside of the large cities who never have seen the inside of an
opera house can become familiar with the works of the masters; communities
where no hall exists large enough for a symphony concert can listen to the largest
orchestras of the country ; and the fortunes of a Negro comedy pair can provide
social talk throughout the nation. Isolation of backward regions is lessened
by the new agency of communication, and moreover, by short wave transmission
national as well as local isolation is broken, for events in foreign nations are
thereby brought to the United States. The radio, like the newspaper, has
widened the horizons of the individual, but more vitally, since it makes him an
auditory participant in distant events as they transpire and communicates
to him some of the emotional values that inhere in them.63

It took the newspapers many years to develop a relatively high stand-
ard of advertising ethics, to be able somewhat to curtail their desire for
profits in the interest of public welfare, and to demand an approximation
to truth on the part of advertisers. Radio is new in the advertising busi-
ness, and has not yet had time to develop, or at least to apply, comparable
standards. Further, it cannot be controlled by the necessity of conform-
ing to post office regulations and the strict limitations with respect to the
use of the mails for fraudulent advertising.

The formal ideals of the big chains are high enough. For example,
NBC has announced that "false or questionable statements and all other
forms of misrepresentation must be eliminated." But, in practice, these
ideals are often conveniently forgotten. An impressive exhibit of
fraudulent advertising over the radio today has been prepared by Peter
Morell in his book Poisons, Potions and Profits**

Flagrant frauds are frequently presented in the most sanctimonious

62 See M. H. Neumeyer, "Radio and Social Research," in Sociology and Social
Research, November-December, 1940, pp. 114-124.
•8 Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. I, p. 215.
«* Knight, 1937.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 527

manner. On one program overheard by the writer, the announcer was
presenting the virtues of a once popular horse remedy, being recommended
over the radio for human use under a trade name, at many times the
price of the product under its natural name. This was followed by a
feeling rendition of the old hymn, "My Faith looks up to Thee, Thou
Lamb of Calvary." Some of the most legitimate and effective advertising
in the world today is presented over the radio, but it is unquestionably
true that frauds and fakes can be ballyhooed over the air with a freedom
and facility denied to them in any other legitimate advertising medium
except the movies. There is, however, evidence that the ethical level of
radio advertising has improved in the last few years.

We have already referred briefly to the radio newspaper, an innovation
which has only recently been made practicable. This has been called
"potentially the most socially significant invention since the development
of the printing press." This so-called radio newspaper is a facsimile re-
ceiving set, about the size of a table radio. By attaching it to an ordinary
radio one can provide himself with a sort of electric printing press which
is able to pick news and pictures out of the air and put them down in
black and white. It prints without ink and without type under a com-
plicated form of electrical operation. One of these attachments can
print a three- or five-column paper. Unbelievably economical, it can be
produced to sell at a profit for 40 dollars or less. The potential signifi-
cance of this device has been summarized by Miss Ruth Brindze:

The technical problems are far simpler than the social and economic ones, for
if the development of facsimile broadcasting continues, as there is every reason
to believe that it will, city folks as well as those who live on the farms can be
supplied with newspapers and other reading material by radio. The Radio Cor-
poration's facsimile receiver is already equipped with a blade for cutting the
printed rolls of paper into convenient page sizes. With the addition of a simple
binding device, books and magazines may be produced by the little radio printing
machine. The possibilities are unlimited. As events take place, as history is
made, the facsimile machines will produce directly in the home a contemporaneous
printed record. No newspapers will be able to compete. Facsimile will be
faster, more convenient, cheaper. At the trivial cost of the rolls of paper and
the electric current, the audience will be supplied with more printed matter than
it can read. Every day's paper may be as bulky as the Sunday Times; magazines
and books will achieve a circulation of a hundred million.65

Television Emerges

Another striking invention connected with the radio which is no longer
"just around the corner" is television.66 Most of the scientific and
engineering problems connected with it have already been solved, though
there are some difficulties remaining to be overcome before television can
be made technically perfect. As Mr. Craven points out, the problems
lying ahead are chiefly economic and social. It is a question of whether
there will be an adequate market for television instruments and whether

65 "Next—the Radio Newspaper," the Nation, February 5, 1938, pp. 154-155. See
also J. F. L. Hogan, "Facsimile and Its Future Uses," The Annals, January, 1941,
pp. 162-169.

66 On the current status of television, see The Annals, January, 1941, pp. 130-152.

528 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

there will be a large public willing to remain at home and use television
apparatus instead of going to moving picture houses and watching the
newsreels, which may then be almost as simultaneous in the reproduction
of events as television:

The next corner to be turned, however, is an economic rather than an engineer-
ing one, and it can be stated briefly in one short question "Who is to pay for
television?" Will the public accept a television service based upon a continuance
of the present system of commercial aural broadcasting and its extension into
television? Will a "looker-in" be willing to sit in a darkened living-room at home
intently peering into the screen of his television receiver? 67

The General Electric Company made a prediction as to the growth of
television in the next few years, as follows: 68

Year Sets Sold Average Price

1940 199,000 $250

1941 414,000 200

1942 846,000 160

1943 1,371,000 150

1944 1,903,000 150

By 1945, there would be about 4,700,000 home receiving sets, valued at
about 750 million dollars, served by 512 transmitting stations, costing
54 millions.

In an article on "Where Does Television Belong?" in Harper's, Febru-
ary, 1940, a radio engineer, Irving Fiske, is sceptical about the realization
of this program of television expansion. He doubts that television can
ever be made as popular in the home as the radio. He holds that tele-
vision requires a degree of constant attention that only group participa-
tion in a common experience can produce. Hence he sees the main future
of television in theatres, where it may replace the current news-reels.
As Mr. Fiske summarizes the matter:

The only place in which television can adequately meet the basic human needs
is the theatre; and abroad, at least, theatre television has come forward in re-
sponse. Overemphasis on home television seems so far to have paralyzed efforts
in that direction here.69

The failure of a home demand for television to keep pace with technical
facilities in this field seems to give some confirmation to Mr. Fiske's ideas.
If television should be confined mainly to the theatre, it would mean that,
while a large public might be served, the number of sets that could be sold
would be relatively few, as compared with the radio sets used by the vast
army of radio listeners.

Perhaps the most searching discussion of the present status and future
possibilities of television is an anonymous but authoritative contribution
on "What's Happened to Television?" in the Saturday Review of Liter a-

67 Technological Trends and National Policy, Government Printing Office, 1937,
p. 233.

68 Harpers, February, 1940, p. 265.

69 Fiske, loc. cit., p. 268.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 529

ture.™ Pointing out that television has overcome most of its technical
problems, the author considers the chief factors which are retarding the
rapid advance of television. He does not share Mr. Fiske's view that its
future lies mainly in theatres, but holds that it has great possibilities of
popular adoption under proper encouragement. While not hostile in
principle to television, the Federal Communications Commission has
placed a fatal barrier in the way of its progress by banning television
networks. Without networks, the cost of excellent television programs
will prove prohibitive. They can only be made practicable by serving
many communities at once and thus cutting the costs. The moving
pictures refuse to cooperate with television for fear of the competition
which may be offered by a full-blown television industry. The news-
papers show the same hostility to television that they do to radio. They
give little publicity to television and what they do give is usually adverse
and discouraging to potential television users. Even the radio industry,
which is responsible for television, has of late refused to promote it vigor-
ously or intelligently for fear that it may be ruinous to the heavy invest-
ment in conventional radio equipment and activities:

While television is a penned-up dragon to the movies and the press, and a
Pandora's box to the government, it is strictly a hot potato to the radio indus-
try

That's what happened to television after its brief flurry a year ago. The pow-
erful interests in the press, the movies, and the radio put it as far back on the
shelf as they could because they saw in it a threat to their status quo. They
shelved it because the public was beginning to get interested in it, and they knew
that whatever the American public interests itself in, it usually gets.71

Despite, these obstacles, television has not been suppressed. Gilbert
Seldes thus describes the impressive number and variety of programs put
on by the Television department of the Columbia Broadcasting System in
the two months after December 7, 1941:

240 programs of fully visualized news.
38 programs of special war features; including programs devoted to the

armed forces, production and civilian morale.
33 programs by the Red Cross devoted to first aid instruction.
24 programs by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

24 programs of sports, including tournaments staged in the television studio.
12 programs of country dances.
12 round table discussions — generally by authorities in their respective fields

— on subjects foremost in the American mind.
12 programs devoted to dancing instruction.
12 visual quizzes.
12 variety shows.

In addition, a number of special programs were put on, along with an
hour program every week devoted to experimental work with color tele-

70 February 21, 1942. The anonymous author is actually a leading expert in the
field of television.

71 Loc. cit., p. 17.

530 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

vision broadcasts.72 The above data will give some indication of the
current achievements and activities of television and will afford some
reassurance that this important innovation in communication will not be
indefinitely delayed in making its potential contribution to American
enlightenment and entertainment.

The future possibilities of television, provided it comes into general
use, have been well described by Karl A. Bickel:

The twist of a dial and the throw of a switch will enable you, in your sitting
room, to see and hear the Kentucky Derby, to have a better vision of a great
prizefight or athletic contest than even the box-holders, to range the world,
attending the theater or opera, visiting important banquets, sitting in with
Congress in Washington, or viewing an airplane meet in Africa.73

Because of its close connection with radio, we might say a word here
about the current status of the phonograph, which represents an im-
portant, if highly specialized, type of communication. The sale of phono-
graph records reached its peak in 1921, at 100 million. With the growth
of radio in the '20's, record sales fell off sharply and the industry was all
but given up for dead. But in the '30's there was a marked pick-up. In
1938, some 35 million records were sold and all manufacturers were far
behind their orders. Sales have gained since.

There were a number of reasons for this revival of the phonograph,
particularly the provision of the combination radio and phonograph and
the record-playing radio attachment, the interest in swing and classical
music, essentially created by the radio, and the rebellion against radio
commercials and serials. The phonograph enables us to get immediately
and directly the music we wish, without having to listen to other features
which we regard with either indifference or repugnance. Much of the
phonograph and record business of the country is controlled by the Radio
Corporation of America.

Communications and the Social Future

The enormous influence exerted by the new instruments of communi-
cation upon human life and social institutions in the immediate past is
obyious to all careful observers. Their future effects may be even more
far-reaching, because many of these instruments of communication
have only been recently developed, and others of an even more impres-
sive and upsetting character may be provided within the present, or
coming generation:

It is impossible to discuss here the ramifications of the most obvious changes
in American life summarized by the preceding data. On the one hand is a process
of integration and adjustment ; on the other is a lively competition accompanied
by mutual fears: railroad fighting bus; bus fighting street car; newspapers con-
cerned over radio advertising; moving picture competing with radio; hotel
fighting with tourist camp. The ultimate outcome cannot be predicted; one can

72 Saturday Review of Literature, March 14, 1942, p. 13.

73 Bickel, New Empires, Lippincott, 1930, p. 43; see also, David Sarnoff, "Possible
Social Effects of Television," The Annals, January, 1941, pp. 145-152.

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION 531

only be impressed with the changes that go on before the eyes and marvel at the
way in which American life, and the habits of the individual citizens, are being
transformed.74

The social and cultural impact of our new agencies of communication
has been powerful and pervasive. The speed, scope and diversity of
human contacts have been multiplied on a scale never before imagined.
Devices of untold potency for mass impression have come into being.
Social groups and entire nations may be manipulated by propaganda as
never before. The great danger in these remarkable transformations lies
in the fact that they have been brought into being in planless fashion,
purely as a product of the competitive system and motivated almost solely
by the desire for pecuniary profits. There has been little opportunity to
guide their development in such a fashion as to make a maximum con-
tribution to the well-being of human society. They may confer upon
us untold benefits or may lead to domestic confusion and international
chaos:

It is as agencies of control that the newspaper, the motion picture and the
radio raise problems of social importance. The brief survey of their development
in each instance shows increased utilization coupled with concentration of facili-
ties. For his news, the reader of the paper is dependent largely upon the great
news gathering agencies; for his motion pictures, there is dependency upon a
group of well organized producers; for his radio, he comes more and more in
contact with large and powerful stations, dominated increasingly by the nation-
wide broadcasting organizations. Mass impression on so vast a scale has never
before been possible.

The effects produced may now be quite unpremeditated, although the machin-
ery opens the way for mass impression in keeping with special ends, private or
public. The individual, the figures show, increasingly utilizes these media and
they inevitably modify his attitudes and behavior. What these modifications
are to be depends entirely upon those who control the agencies. Greater possi-
bilities for social manipulation, for ends that are selfish or socially desirable, have
never existed. The major problem is to protect the interests and welfare of the
individual citizen. . . .

In short, an interconnecting, interconnected web of communication lines has
been woven about the individual. It has transformed his behavior and his atti-
tudes no less than it has transformed social organization itself. The web has
developed largely without plan or aim. The integration has been in consequence
of competitive forces, not social desirability. In this competition the destruction
of old and established agencies is threatened.75

As to the immediate future of communication agencies Mr. Craven
believes that their most desirable services would be the penetration of
hitherto inaccessible regions, and the use of existing communication
agencies to improve international goodwill:

It is believed that the greatest service which communications can do in the
future will be to provide extensions into the hitherto remote and inaccessible
places whereby people who formerly had no means of communication can be
connected with the communication arteries of the world. Tremendous progress

74 M. M. Wilky and S. A. Rice, "Communication," The American Journal of
Sociology, University of Chicago Press, May, 1931, p. 977.

™ M. M, Willey and S. A. Rice, Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, pp. 215-217.

532 TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATION

has been made during the last decade in this direction and, undoubtedly, tremen-
dous progress will take place in the future.

The other great forward step in world civilization which can be made is in
the effective use of communications, both telegraph and telephone by wire, but
more especially by radio, in the development of understanding, mutual respect
and tolerance among the nations of the world. Much has been done along these
lines in the past and a great deal more is expected in the future.76

This is certainly a high and noble ideal, but as O. W. Riegel has pointed
out in his important book, Mobilizing for Chaos , there is grave danger
that the new agencies of communication may be utilized in the interest
of super-patriotism and militarism, with the wrecking of civilization at
the end of the line.77 At least, they are likely to do so unless we take
prompt steps to safeguard ourselves against this disaster.

76 Technological Trends and National Policy, p. 233.

77 See below, pp. 557 ff., 583-585.

CHAPTER XIV

Molding Public Opinion: Prejudice/ Propaganda,
and Censorship

The Role of Prejudice in Modern Life

Causes of Prejudice. In this chapter we shall consider various prac-
tices and attitudes concerned with the control of both individual and
public opinion. In order to gain proper perspective and understanding
of such efforts, it is necessary to comprehend the origins and character of
the prejudices and biases that operate upon the human mind.

The word prejudice is derived from the Latin word praejudicium,
meaning a judicial examination before trial. In literal English, prejudice
means a decision arrived at without examination of the facts. It is an
automatic or spontaneous bias, which may be either favorable or un-
favorable. We may be prejudiced in favor of something or against it.
Most commonly, however, we think of a prejudice as an unfavorable bias
or antipathy toward something. In its most elementary sense, this
prejudice or spontaneous bias may be purely physical, in the sense that
the human organism favors something warm and comfortable as against
something cold and rough. But, in a cultural or institutional sense, a
prejudice is always a psycho-physical reaction, a conditioned response,
shaped by our life experiences. Whatever the prejudice, whether favor-
able or unfavorable and regardless of the type of prejudice, it is always
an emotional response. As soon as reason enters the picture, the potency
of the prejudice is diminished. Most prejudices, however, are so highly
charged with emotion that they automatically exclude reason from the
premises.

Perhaps the underlying cause of prejudice is the automatic antipathy
to ideas and experiences markedly different from those with which we are
familiar. Franklin Henry Giddings contended that the chief force hold-
ing men together in society is "the consciousness of kind." People natu-
rally react cordially to the familiar, and are spontaneously hostile to the
strange and different. As David S. Muzzey has put the matter:

Our own views seem to us right, or they would not be our views. How
readily we warm to a person who agrees with us in a judgment or an argument,
even though his opinion be far less entitled to respect than that of our opponent.
We hanker for confirmation, because of the subtle flattery it brings to our self-
esteem. Hobbes' characterization of mankind as a "race of unmitigated ego-
maniacs" may be a bit too severe, but it is nevertheless true that one of the most

533

534 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

difficult things in the world is to wean a mind from the precarious self-assurance
on which it has been fed by centuries of custom and conformity.1

It has been necessary for man to demand a high degree of uniformity in
social behavior.2 Man is relatively helpless by himself. Group life has
always been essential to human safety and progress. For this reason,
group discipline must be enforced, in order to unify the community and
make it more safe and efficient. Rules of conduct and thought must be
prescribed and the violators thereof made to suffer. This group disci-
pline, so essential to human survival, has exacted a high price in the way
of ruthlessly stamping out the innovator and the rebel. The history of
civilization is, in a sense, a record of the extension of the variety and area
of dissent that society will tolerate:

After all, intolerance is merely the manifestation of the protective instinct of
the herd. The life of the individuals is so dependent upon the life of the group,
that the group, and the various individuals in the group, are afraid to let any
individual say or do anything that might endanger the protective power of the
group.

Thus a pack of wolves is intolerant of the wolf that is different and invariably
gets rid of this offending individual. A tribe of cannibals is intolerant of the
individual who threatens to provoke the wrath of the gods and bring disaster
ujxm the whole community, and so drives him into the wilderness. The Greek
commonwealth cannot afford to harbor within its sacred walls one who dares to
question the very basis of its organization, and so in an outburst of intolerance
condemns the offender to drink the poison. The Roman cannot hope to survive
if a small group of zealots play fast and loose with laws held indispensable since
the days of Romulus, and so is driven into deeds of intolerance. The Church
depended in early days for her continued existence upon the absolute obedience
of even the humblest of her subjects and is driven to such extremes of suppres-
sion and cruelty that many prefer the ruthlessness of the Turk to the charity
of the Christian. And in a period of hysterical fear, even we Americans are
assured that our government cannot withstand criticism, and so we throw into
prison or deport from our shores those who dare offer it.

And so it goes throughout the ages until life, which might be a glorious adven-
ture, is turned into a horrible experience, and all this happens because human
existence so far has been entirely dominated by fear.8

Custom and habit have also played their part in prejudicing us in favor
of th6 familiar. The habitual and the traditional are not only safe, they
are also easy. Our muscular reflexes and our mental patterns are adapted
to doing things in the way we have been taught to do them. It is easiest
to think and act in the old grooves to which we have been accustomed
since childhood. Habit, as William James pointed out, is the great fly-
wheel of society. We need give little attention to habitual modes of
thought and behavior. Years of adjustment have made us largely un-
conscious of their operation. New ways and thoughts, on the other hand,
are troublesome and painful. This pain is not only psychological, it is

1 David S. Muzzey, Essays in Intellectual History, Dedicated to James Harvey
Robinson, Harper, 1929, pp. 7-8.

2 See above, pp. 16 ff., 29 ff.

8 J. H. Dietrich, The Road to Tolerance, privately published, Minneapolis, 1929.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 535

also mildly physiological, as the new science of endocrinology has made
clear. When something strange challenges our customary way of doing
things, we automatically become angry. And anger is accompanied by
definite physiological changes in the body. The adrenal glands secrete
their mysterious chemical substance into the blood. The liver releases
more sugar which is burned up rapidly and gives us a temporary increase
of energy. Any innovation upsets our whole established scheme of
things, cuts across our habitual reactions, and forces readjustments that
our timid and lazy nature resents and resists. New ways and ideas are
also a challenge to our self-esteem. They imply a questioning of our
fundamental ideas and of the correctness of our beliefs. They threaten
our life philosophy.

Man's attitude toward the supernatural world has been an important
source of prejudice. It has been believed that the spirit world brings
man both his good luck and his bad. If the gods of the group are properly
obeyed and propitiated, good luck will follow. Strange gods are the
natural enemy of any given social group. Strangers worship strange
gods, and to tolerate them would both enrage the gods of the group and
expose its members to the possible evil action of the gods of the stranger.
Down to modern times the stranger has always been viewed as a potential
enemy.4 This was due, in part, to his worship of strange gods and, in
part, to the fact that his behavior and ideas differed from those of the
group.

Geography has also played its part in both creating and mitigating
prejudice. The greater the social and cultural contacts of any group,
the more it is inclined to be tolerant. Geographical conditions help along
the growth and persistence of prejudice. People shut off from outside
contacts tend to build an ingrowing culture. Almost everything in the
world outside is strange to them, and they react with characteristic
antipathy to the new and the strange. It is natural that the most preju-
diced and intolerant of peoples have been those who live in mountainous
and other isolated areas, while the most tolerant populations have lived
along seacoasts and other natural routes of trade, thus coining into con-
tact with new ideas and customs as well as new commodities.

Divisions into social and economic classes beget prejudice. The no-
bility has looked down upon the trader and the toiler, while the latter
types have naturally resented the exploitation practiced by the nobility.
In our day, industrialists have exhibited widespread prejudices against
the industrial proletariat. They have associated the latter with servility.
The whole psychology of the leisure class has been built up around the
desire to abstain from all manual labor for this is contaminated with
the stigma of servility. On its side, the proletariat has built up a philoso-
phy of hostility to its industrial masters, even going so far as to create the
doctrine of inevitable and eternal class war between capital and labor.

/. Mary Wood, The Stranger, Columbia University Press, 1934.

536 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

Definite prejudices are also based upon social rank and grades. Dwellers
in our palatial city apartments and penthouses look down on those who
inhabit the slums. The latter resent the wealth and display of the rich.

Differences in race and culture have always been a source of prejudice,
from the days of the distinction between Jew and Gentile and Greek and
Barbarian. This has been due, in part, merely to the simple recognition
of physical differences. But race prejudices rest upon many other ele-
ments. Variations in religion, customs, and beliefs, all of which are
thought to undermine the culture and stability of the group, are held to
be carried by strange races. Neighboring races have also very frequently
been political and military enemies, thus giving a realistic basis for race
prejudice.

Social taste and etiquette contribute their quota to prejudice. What
is accepted among the elite is regarded as right. Different ways of doing
things and conducting oneself are an affront to taste. They also upset
the social regimen and tend to create confusion and trouble. There may
be no substantial scientific foundation for standards of etiquette. There
seems to be no valid logical reason why a man should remove his hat in
the presence of women in an elevator in an apartment house and keep it
on while in an elevator in a department store. But society sets its
standards and is outraged when they are challenged. The manners and
etiquette of a person from a different culture may actually be far more
polished, but the standards of taste are those of the group.

Closely associated with taste and etiquette as a source of prejudice is
self-esteem. One of the things which makes life agreeable to us is our
personal conviction that we are doing the right things in the right way.
Any differences of belief and conduct are a challenge to our philosophy of
life and our standards of behavior.

Education should be a leading instrument for combating prejudice, by
revealing the spontaneous and primitive character of group behavior and
prejudice. It should make us more tolerant of differences. Unfortu-
nately, however, most education down to our time has intensified prejudice
instead of dissipating it. Education has been devoted primarily to the
perpetuation of the ideas and prejudices of any given group. It has
supplemented the spontaneous element in the acquisition of prejudice.
Many pseudo-scientific doctrines and religious dogmas have been em-
bodied in the educational tradition and are thus given prestige and in-
creased influence in conserving and passing on prejudices. The tendency
in education to glorify the culture of the group and represent it as superior
to that of others has been an important factor in the increased prominence
of nationalism, the modern and inflated version of primitive group preju-
dice.

A conspicuous fact about the origin of our prejudices is that we pick
them up automatically and unconsciously in the process of our psycho-
logical development. They become a part of our mental equipment.
Most of them are acquired in childhood before the individual possesses
any substantial body of accurate knowledge that might enable him to

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 537

recognize and discount them. This fact has been very clearly pointed out
by Robert L. Duffus:

Children acquire beliefs like this exactly as they acquire their language, their
games, and their gang traditions. They learn from their parents^ their school
teachers, their companions, and, as they grow older, from motion pictures, news-
papers, magazines, and books. Being human, they learn what isn't so just as
thoroughly as what is so and believe it just as firmly.

The^most primitive form of race prejudice is fear — the savage's hostility to a
member of a tribe not his own, the child's dread of a stranger who differs in
some marked way from its own father or mother. But even this doesn't seem
to be inborn. It is put into the child's nature by some outside influence, or
influences, after the child comes into the world. Let a parent manifest race
prejudice by a word or even a gesture, or a facial expression, and the child will
imitate. Race prejudice may begin before the boy or girl has learned to talk.

When the child is five or six years old the fear may turn into hostility — a race
riot in miniature. There will be a stage when foreigners are merely absurd and
amusing. Finally, among children of different races attending the higher grades
of the same school there will be jealousy arising out of the competition for marks
and honors. By this time the child of the "superior" breed has learned that the
child of the "inferior" should be kept in his place. Groups form, sharp social
lines are drawn, and the chasm between black and white, white and yellow, or
"American" and "Wop" is likely to become permanent. Even though in a fit
of deliberate liberalism we try to bridge it in later life, we frequently cannot.

Most of us don't try. We merely rationalize. The middle-aged business man
who swallows the Nordic gospel hook, line, and sinker today, may believe that
he got his reasons from Lothrop Stodclard, or that his shrinking from contact
with the lesser breeds is the will of God. But the chances are that he learned
it all at school, along with his arithmetic and geography, or at home, along with
his table manners.

Girls, being earlier responsive to group traditions and loyalties, are found to
become race conscious sooner than their brothers. As they grow older the social
pressure arising from a dread of inter-marriage becomes stronger. They begin
to fear, not without reason, that broadmindedness in their relations with the
"inferior" races may cause them to lose caste. A boy's caste, somehow, seems less
fragile. . Yet boys of sixteen are commonly found to be more snobbish than boys
of twelve. There has been more time and more experiences with which to build
prejudice — to educate in jealousy and dislike.

All this affords a hint as to how our opinions get into us. They are not made
what they are by heredity. They are not produced by accurately digested facts.
They are all that our lives are— colorful, unreasonable, egoistic.5

Types of Prejudice. The prejudices associated with nationalism are
the most prevalent and dangerous prejudices of our era.6 They provide
the main psychological impulse to war and thus place civilization in seri-
ous jeopardy. Nationalism gained rather than declined after the
first World War. Fascism, in fact, elevated nationalism to the status of
a religion. Intense nationalism makes it quite impossible to view toler-
antly and rationally the culture and conduct of other nations. It teaches
us to follow our country slavishly, whether right or wrong. Moreover,
there is a notable tendency to emphasize the fact that our country is
always right, whatever the historical facts. Germanic historians have

5 "Where Do We Get Our Prejudices?" Harper's, September, 1926, p. 507.

6 See above, pp. 219 ff.

538 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

represented medieval culture as a product of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon
civilization, while the French historians trace it back to the culture of
Roman Gaul. Many Germans have derided the French Revolution as
a brutal orgy, conducted by a race incapable of self-discipline, while
French historians have praised it as an epic of deliverance from tyranny
and a great contribution to democracy and liberty. French and British
historians tend to have a markedly different interpretation of the role
and achievements of Napoleon. Only a few historians in any country
have been able to arrive at an accurate and dispassionate notion of the
outbreak of the first World War, and our ideas of the second World War
are as yet no more than sheer fantasy. Intense nationalism makes it
difficult, if not impossible, to preserve a rational and understanding atti-
tude in respect to foreign affairs and international relations.

There are, of course, many other forms of political prejudice. We have
the prejudice of the conservative against the radical, and of the radical
against the conservative. Likewise, the middle-of-the-road liberals tend
to be hostile to both extreme groups. It is difficult for any one of the
three types to possess an unbiased and intelligent view of the merits of
the others. Then there are the well-known prejudices associated with
political parties. With many, loyalty to party almost exceeds loyalty to
the nation. Members of other parties are viewed as inferior beings, or as
the natural enemies of humanity. The party becomes a vested political
interest, which is defended with great fervor. Party names, symbols, and
catchwords are adopted and serve to vivify and perpetuate these party
prejudices. The latter are capable of producing an entirely false notion
of the character of political parties.

This is admirably illustrated by the situation in the United States for
the last half century or more. There have been no striking differences
between the Republican and Democratic parties. Both have been com-
mitted to the capitalistic system and have represented essentially the same
type of economic interests. The differences between them have been of
an entirely minor nature. Yet, party prejudice has been able to create
the illusion that the contest between the Republicans and Democrats is
very real and a matter of intense moment to the country. The partisan
conflicts have often attained a bitterness, as in the campaign of 1936,
exceeding that manifested in the very real class differences between, let
us say, the conservative and labor parties in Great Britain.

Finally we may refer to the long-enduring prejudice against allowing
women to participate in politics. This was simply a rationalization of
political facts as they existed in an early patriarchal order. In those
days women's physical weakness subordinated them to males and thus
they could not share political equality with men. This prejudice endured
for many millenniums. In the nineteenth century, feminism appeared,
with a contrary set of prejudices. Some of the feminists merely argued
that women possess as much political ability as men — certainly a
modest and defensible contention ; but others, in an excess of zeal, argued
that women are endowed with special forms of political sagacity superior

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 539

to any which men can display. The political prejudice against women
in politics has, in our day, been more successfully done away with than
the other forms of political prejudice. But it has been revived in various
Fascist states.

Economic prejudices are so obvious and powerful that whole philoso-
phies of history have been constructed which argue that civilization must
be entrusted to the agricultural nobility, the commercial and industrial
middle class, or the industrial proletariat. In early days, the pastoral
peoples and those engaged in agriculture warred against each other for
millenniums. Then, in turn, the agricultural classes feared and hated the
rising commercial groups who inhabited the towns. The great political
struggles of early modern times were primarily manifestations of the
struggle of the rising commercial or bourgeois class for political equality
with the vested agricultural interests. Then, after the Industrial Revo-
lution, which began in the eighteenth century, the commercial and indus-
trial classes became suspicious and fearful of the factory workers. The
political battles of the last century have been colored by the efforts of the
laboring class in the cities to participate in politics and gain a prominent
role in political life. In every case, the vested economic interests desired
to hold on to their possessions and advantages and they attacked vigor-
ously the pretensions and virtues of those who contested with them for
power. This has proved true, even when the proletariat has come into a
position of domination. The Communists in Soviet Russia are as bitterly
hostile to the capitalists as the latter are to the Reds.

Not only do these economic prejudices exist between major economic
classes; they are sometimes even more intense between various sectors of
the same economic class. This can be well illustrated by the situation in
contemporary America. The hatred between various groups of capitalists
is almost as great as that between the latter and the radicals. The
Liberty Leaguers attacked the New Deal with as great vehemence as
they did the Communists and Socialists, and the advocates of the New
Deal returned the compliment with vigor and enthusiasm, denouncing
their opponents as Economic Royalists. Likewise, the Socialists war
against the Communists, and vice versa. Even among the Communists
there are cliques whose hatreds are even more intense than the antipathy
of all radicals to Wall Street. The Trotskyites hate the Stalinists more
than either hate the House of Morgan or the Bank of England. Finally,
even in the Labor movement, outside of truly radical circles, there are
vigorous prejudices, as witnessed by the battles between the American
Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Law is a powerful instrument for upholding and executing both political
and economic prejudices. In the United States, especially since the
Civil War, our constitutional law has operated as a defense of capitalism
against reform by either progressives or radicals.7 It has stood in the way
of social progress through declaring reform legislation unconstitutional,

7 See above, pp. 406 ff.

540 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

making special use of the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment. It has usually exhibited a definite hostility toward organized
labor through ordering the enforcement of yellow-dog contracts and freely
granting injunctions against strikers. However, under the New Deal
and the Wagner Act, the force of the law was invoked to legalize trade
unionism and collective bargaining. In Soviet Russia, the law imposed
even more severe disabilities upon capitalism than it did upon labor and
radicalism in the United States.

Law has also upheld various types of political prejudices. It has been
used to exclude the propertyless classes and women from the right to
participate in political life. In a number of American states the law
excludes Communists and other radicals from the right to organize
as a political party. Despite the fact that our country was founded
through revolution, more than half of the states have passed laws which
outlaw the preaching of political revolution and impose serious penalties
therefor. Law has also been used to uphold nationalism and militarism
by denying citizenship to those who will not promise to bear arms under
all circumstances.

Law has also been exploited in behalf of religious and race prejudices.
In the early history of our country the right to vote was denied to un-
believers. Today, in certain states, the testimony of unbelievers is not
accepted in court. Religious observances in the schools are frequently
prescribed by law. On the other hand, when certain religious prejudices
conflict with patriotic legislation the holders of such religious beliefs are
penalized, as, for example, in the present legal persecution of Jehovah's
Witnesses. Race discrimination exists in our law in such manifestations
as the legislation against the immigration of Orientals and the many and
numerous forms of discrimination against the Negroes in the South.

Not only does law uphold many other types of prejudices, but it also
supplies an important group of prejudices all its own.8 The attitude of
the mass of the American public toward law itself represents a definite
sort of prejudice. Laws, which are the product of fallible human law-
makers, are held in awe and respect. There is a prevalent notion that
law is something above and superior to man. This constitutes a definite
hangover from the primitive reverence and taboos associated with early
legal codes. Constitutional law is particularly subject to reverence by
the unthinking. This was clearly manifested during the struggle over
the reorganization of the Supreme Court in 1937. Judges take on by
contagion the sanctity which attaches to law itself. When on the bench
men who have been shrewd practicing politicians or enthusiastic servants
of corporate wealth come to be endowed, in the popular imagination, with
super-human qualities of probity and detachment. The whole concept
of contempt of court reflects the popular reverence for law and judges.
The judge is endowed with the same sanctity which earlier attached to
the medicine-man and magician. The whole courtroom procedure is

8 See above, pp. 37S-391.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 541

colored by a complex of traditional prejudices with respect to the nature
and conduct of the law.

Within the legal profession itself there are many conflicting prejudices.
Professor Fred RodelPs Woe Unto You, Lawyers, is an expression of
a progressive lawyer's prejudice against the dominant prejudices of the
legal profession.9 Most lawyers look upon law as the custodian of things
as they are and the protector of private property. Others regard it as
primarily the instrument of social engineering and human progress. The
code of ethics of the legal profession is colored by prejudice. There is
no taboo placed upon directing rich corporations as to ways of evading
the law, but such practices as ambulance-chasing are fiercely condemned.

Religious prejudices are numerous and bitter, although we no longer
put thousands of people to death because of their religious beliefs, as they
used to do in the days of the medieval heresies and the Spanish Inquisi-
tion. The religious person looks upon the unbeliever as a monster of vice.
The militant atheist, equally vehement, sees the faithful as feeble-
minded dupes. Religious prejudices tend to be particularly vigorous
and dogmatic, because it is assumed that God stands behind our particular
variety of religious prejudice. Further, it is believed that our earthly
good luck and fortune depend upon vigorous adherence to our religious
faith.

There is still a good deal of bitterness of feeling and marked prejudices
among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants ; also between and within Protes-
tant sects. Where the feeling between Catholics and Protestants is most
intense, neither group is really willing to concede that the other is entitled
to full standing as members of the human race. Anti-Semitism and the
Ku Klux Klan have been testimonials to the extent and intensity of
Protestant prejudice. Catholic prejudice expresses itself in a more adroit
and underground fashion than Protestant prejudice, but it is just as
vigorous. The very existence and perpetuation of Judaism rests con-
siderably upon ancient prejudices against other religious groups.

The slight historical and factual basis for all this religious prejudice is
demonstrated by the fact that there is little fundamental diff erence among
the basic beliefs of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. They accept, with
slight variations, the same holy book, the same philosophy of history and
salvation, and revere the same religious characters. On over 90 per cent
of all the fundamental elements in Christian beliefs, the Catholics and
Protestants are united. But over the 10 per cent of difference oceans of
blood have been shed.

Race prejudice is one of the most obvious of the antipathies which have
afflicted mankind from early days. This has been due, in part, merely to
the automatic perception of physical differences. But race prejudice rests
upon many other factors. Differences in religion, customs, and beliefs,
all of which are thought to threaten the culture and stability of the group,
are supposed to be carried by strange races. Different races have very

8 See above, pp. 376-380.

542 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

frequently been also political and military enemies, thus giving a prac-
tical foundation for mutual hostility. However, there is a tendency even
when peaceful relations have been established for many generations for
the hostility to persist as a tradition. In the United States it manifests
itself chiefly in the prejudice of the Southern whites against the Negroes.
When, however, Negroes assert real racial equality in the North, they run
up against much the same prejudices that they meet in the South. We
have also manifested race prejudice against Mongolian Orientals in our
immigration restriction laws, and in discriminating legislation passed by
Pacific states. Economic interests often merge with race prejudice in
our attitude towards other types. The Southerners have a definite
economic interest in keeping the Negroes in a position of inferiority.
The legislation against Orientals was motivated in part by the challenge
of the Chinese to white labor in the West and of the Japanese to white
agricultural interests on the Pacific coast. Race prejudice operates even
where therfc are no essential race differences. We tend to regard the
foreigner as of a different race, even when he comes of essentially the
same physical stocks as those which built up the original population of
the United States.

The most evident example of racial prejudice, which has no real rela-
tion to race as a scientific fact, is anti-Semitism. The Jews are in no
sense a cohesive, separate race. The real differences which stir up anti-
Semitic prejudices are of a cultural character, such as religious practices,
social customs, and the reluctance to intermarry with Gentiles. Then
there is a long tradition of anti-Semitism brought to this country by the
European settlers. The financial and commercial sagacity of the Jews
and their prominence in the professions have also fostered hostility.
Anti-Semitism was revived in most flagrant fashion by Hitler and the
Nazis, and imitated by Mussolini, but there have been many flare-ups in
England and the United States since the first World War.

Professional Semitism and pro-Semitism are as much the product of
prejudice as anti-Semitism.10 In the face of enforced social inferiority,
the Jews have asserted their superior cultural capacity. Persecuted as
a race, they have maintained a fictitious racial identity. Being treated
as inferiors, they have naturally developed a compensatory assertiveness
and aggressiveness which the Gentiles mistakenly interpret as a racial
characteristic of the Jews. If prejudices were removed from both sides
of the question, there would be neither anti-Semitism nor Jewish opposi-
tion to speedy assimilation with Gentiles.

Moral prejudice is closely associated with religious prejudice. Indeed,
it is a sort of synthesis of religious, economic, and social prejudices. It
also embraces certain prejudices which are derived from etiquette. Acts
which grossly offend our sense of propriety tend to be regarded as im-
moral. Like religious prejudice, moral prejudice is especially full of
vehemence and self-assurance. We take it for granted that God approves

10 Cf. H. L. Mencken, in American Hebrew, September 7, 1934.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 543

the brand of narrow-mindedness we employ in appraising our own con-
duct and that of others. Since conventional morality is closely associated
with supernatural religion, it is rare that a person examines his own
moral convictions objectively. They are taken for granted to be sound,
impeccable, and quite unchallengeable. As Mencken and others have
pointed out, another strong source of moral prejudice is the sentiment
of the invidious.11 We disapprove of those things which our limited cir-
cumstances prevent us from doing. Then there is the influence of right-
eous hypocrisy. A person guilty of one form or another of anti-social
conduct often seeks to compensate and to give himself mental calm by
ostentatious correctness with regard to certain other conventionalities,
and gives evidence of a holy wrath against those who violate them. A
case in point is the support of anti-vice societies by financial and corpo-
rate moguls.

Our educational prejudices are numerous. Our entire culture is, in
part, a mosaic of traditional prejudices, and it is the function ef education
to transmit this culture. A traditional form of educational prejudice
upholds the punitive ideals of education. It lays great stress upon edu-
cation as the disciplinarian of the will. The latter is to be strengthened
through imposing unpleasant tasks, the execution of which is insisted
upon with vigor and thoroughness. Much of the traditional curriculum
represents archaic prejudices which have grown up in various periods of
the history of civilization and have been handed down in the educational
process. Such are the notions of the special educational virtues of the
classics and mathematics. Another example is afforded by the leisure-
class bias in education which leads us to regard most really useful, practi-
cal, and utilitarian subjects as base, "sloppy," and quite incompatible
with sound educational philosophy and practice.

The whole "cultural" ideal in education is, to a considerable extent, an
outgrowth of the prejudices associated with the leisure class and the idea
that the lady and gentleman must be freed from all trace of servility. It
is this which lies at the foundation of the deep-seated prejudice against
vocational education that regards practical subjects as non-educational
or anti-educational. The natural reaction against traditional education
has produced a comparable prejudice in favor of complete personal free-
dom and thorough devotion to spontaneous development. It revives the
old revolt of Rousseau against the pedants of the eighteenth century.
Progressive education is the best example of this prejudice in educational
revolt.

Most social scientists regard prejudice as unfortunate and detrimental
to human well-being. This point of view is shared by the present writer.
But, in all fairness, we should point out that very distinguished scholars
and cultivated gentlemen have sharply challenged this attitude. A good
example is a famous British anthropologist and amiable savant, Sir Arthur
Keith, who wrote a little book on The Place of Prejudice in Modern

11 Cf. H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, Knopf, 1926, pp. 35-43.

544 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

Civilization to expound the thesis that prejudice is a positive and benefi-
cial factor in human culture, giving pride to human beings and vitality to
human effort. Prejudice stimulates competition and argument and thus
promotes the progress of civilization. Keith praises super-patriotism and
race prejudice, and holds that even if they lead to war they are an asset
to the race, since "war is nature's pruning-hook." "Race prejudice, I
believe, works for the ultimate good of mankind and must be given a
recognized place in all our efforts to obtain natural justice for the
world." 12

Some Suggested Remedies for Our Prejudices. Travel leads us to
understand that there are many people with views and customs that differ
markedly from our own, and we must ultimately concede that there are
certain virtues in the beliefs and habits of others. Education of a critical
type, particularly in the fields of history and sociology, has an under-
mining effect on prejudice. History shows the mundane origins of our
prejudices And tears away their pretense to sanctity or invincibility.
Such a sociological work as William Graham Sumner's Folkways, if read
with understanding, should do a great deal to dissipate prejudice. Here
we discover that what is right is usually no more than what is currently
done in any group.

The elimination of belief in the supernatural helps to discredit preju-
dice. It permits us to examine our beliefs and discover that they are of
purely earthly origin ; that they are, for the most part, the product of a
generation less equipped with earthly knowledge than our own. Another
important exercise which promotes the destruction of prejudice is the
study of comparative religion. This shows the common elements in all
the great world-religions and exposes the errors and follies embodied in
religious narrow-mindedness.

The cultivation of an international point of view in culture and public
problems also assists greatly in allaying prejudices. We find that it is
rare that any nation has exclusively created all the cultural possessions
it prizes. We can see clearly the contributions of other peoples to our
own culture and institutions through the* ages.

Likewise, the scientific study of race reveals the fallacies in racial arro-
gance, and disproves the assumption that one race monopolizes all the
virtues of humanity. Such study also demonstrates that there is no such
thing as a pure race today, Aryan or other.

The outlook for the elimination of prejudice in our generation is not
especially bright. We are living in a great transitional age, when old
institutions are crumbling and new ones are seeking to supplant them.
Under such conditions, the vested economic and social interests become
especially ferocious in attempting to protect their hitherto dominant
position. Similarly, the exponents of the new order are especially in-
tolerant in their programs of reform. We see this trend manifested in its
extreme form in Fascism and Communism. Both display ferocity in

*2 Keith, op. cit.f p. 49.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 545

stamping out any deviation from the form of thought and conduct they
set up for the group.

Though nationalism was clearly shown to be a major cause of the
first World War, we learned little from the lesson. We created more
national states, and they were even more guilty of exaggerated national-
ism, both political and economic, than were the nations before the war.

Racial prejudice seems to be gaining. The effort of the Negroes in
the United States to gain economic emancipation has intensified repressive
measures against them. Hitler and Rosenberg have given racial dogmas
and arrogance unprecedented standing and power. Anti-Semitism is
likely to spread elsewhere, in the wake of the second World War. And,
back of all older race conflicts, lies the possibility of sharp racial conflicts
between the Yellow and Black races, on the one hand, and the White race
on the other. It is predicted by many that these suppressed races are on
the eve of a world-wide revolt against their white masters. Realistic
observers of even the most extreme interventionist bias are already con-
ceding that, whatever the outcome of the second World War, there is no
likelihood that white dominion will ever be restored over the Far East.

Political prejudice also seems likely to grow more bitter. Political
parties are taking on a fundamentally economic cast. They are lining
up with capitalism or radicalism. The bitterness of the economic struggle
is thus reflected in the political conflict. In the United States, our
political parties have possessed little realism of late, and they rely upon
the inflation of political prejudices to give them vitality.

The manner in which our leading prejudices express themselves and
operate to influence public opinion will be considered in our analysis of
contemporary propaganda.

Contemporary Propaganda and Mass Persuasion

The Nature and History of Propaganda. No factor in contemporary
social control is more potent, universal, and persuasive than propaganda,
Its novelty, power, and significance have been well emphasized by Luther
H. Gulick:

Another striking new factor in the modern world is propaganda. Mass pro-
duction needs mass consumption, pressure groups seek mass action, politicians
rely on the magic of phrases with the multitude, and whole nations are more than
ever compelling the assent of the governed by manipulating mass emotions.
New developments and inventions in newspaper chains and services, cheap print-
ing, rapid communication and the radio, and the prevalence of shallow education
have combined with world-wide unrest to make propaganda a new and challeng-
ing problem for education.13

There have been a number of attempts to define propaganda. Clyde
R. Miller, of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, offers the following
informal definition: "Propaganda is the attempt to influence others to
some predetermined end by appealing to their thought and feeling."

18 L. H. Gulick, Education for American Life, The Regents' Inquiry, McGraw-Hill,
1938, pp. 33-34.

546 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

Stuart Ayres holds that "propaganda is the planned attempt to control
and regiment the thought and action of the public." Shepard Stone is
content to define propaganda as an effort "to put something across."
Harold Lasswell contends that, in its broadest sense, "propaganda is the
technique of influencing human action by the manipulation of representa-
tions. These representations may take spoken, written, pictorial or
musical form." In one of the best books on the subject, Leonard W.
Doob holds that propaganda is "a systematic attempt by an interested
individual (or individuals) to control the attitudes of groups of individuals
through the use of suggestion and, consequently, to control their actions."
Professor Doob divides propaganda into two types, intentional and un-
intentional. The type of propaganda with which we arc concerned is
intentional propaganda.

In a strict scientific sense, the test of propaganda has no relation to
its being reactionary or liberal; yet, propaganda is generally thought of
as an attempt to influence opinion in unorthodox and novel fashion. In
other words, propaganda is usually regarded as something which deviates
from the norm of conventional attitudes. For example, the methods em-
ployed by conservative newspapers like the New York Herald-Tribune
are conventionally assumed to produce unbiased "news." On the other
hand, a paper no more to the Left than the Herald-Tribune is to the
Right, say the Daily Worker, is customarily regarded as turning out
nothing except "propaganda." In any scholarly analysis of propaganda
we must be quick to recognize that any deliberate attempt to influence
attitudes to a predetermined end is propaganda, whether it emerges from
the Right or the Left, whether it be true as to fact or not, and whether we
agree with it or not.

Propaganda is nothing new in history.14 The novelty in contemporary
propaganda is to be found in the unprecedented variety and potency of
the new agencies through which suggestion may be applied. Propaganda
is about as old as human speech itself. Primitive tradition, handed on
by word of mouth, was virtually propaganda in favor of the prevailing
customs and folkways. The social conscience of mankind was developed
as a phase of counter-propaganda. As J. H. Breasted has pointed out,
the first social reformers on record were Egyptian social idealists who,
about 2000 B.C., carried on a vigorous propaganda against the injustices
of the ruling class of their day. Much of Hebrew theology turned about
the propaganda of the prophets against the priests, and vice versa. A
great deal of Greek philosophy could be called a manifestation of propa-
ganda. The Sophists attacked the traditional thinkers and, in turn,

14 On the history of propaganda, see H. E. Barnes, A History of Historical Writing,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1937; Gorham Munson, Twelve Decisive Battles of
the Mind, Greystone Press, 1942; P. A. Throop, Criticism of the Crusade: A Study
of Public Opinion and Crusade Propaganda, Swets and Zeitlinger, 1940; Philip
Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, University of North Carolina
Press, 1941; C. E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, Macmillan,
1918: H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, University of Oklahoma Press, 1939;
and Porter Sargent, Getting US into War, Sargent, 1941.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 547

Socrates and Plato devoted their lives to refuting the Sophists. The
famous funeral speech that Thucydides put in the mouth of Pericles was
a masterpiece of Athenian propaganda. Few contemporary professional
boosters could do as well. Cato the Elder was a better propagandist for
agriculture than Henry Wallace. Cicero had mastered most of the
propaganda techniques with which we are familiar today. Caesar's Com-
mentaries provided some of the cleverest propaganda ever written. In-
deed, Caesar could show the way to many modern masters of propaganda,
such as Ivy Lee and E. L. Bernays. The historian Tacitus carried on a
vigorous propaganda in behalf of Roman republican institutions and in
opposition to the new imperial tendencies. Juvenal was an extraordi-
narily effective propagandist against the abuses of Roman imperial
society.

Christianity was well-propagandized by the Fathers, who wrote ve-
hemently against the Pagans, against heritical sects, and against the
doctrines of other orthodox Christians of whose dogmas they disapproved.
Perhaps the greatest single collection of propaganda ever published is to
be found in the collected writings of the Christian Fathers from Paul to
Augustine and Isidore. The Secret History of Procopius was a masterly
bit of propaganda against Justinian and the practices of the Byzantine
court. Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, wrote such good Caro-
lingian propaganda that it has colored our interpretation of early medieval
history for centuries. The Crusades were brought on mainly by Peter
the Hermit and Pope Urban, who conducted a spirited propaganda against
Islam and the Mohammedan occupants of the Holy Land. From Luther
onward, the Protestants directed a voluminous and vigorous propaganda
against the Catholics, which was returned in kind. The Magdeburg
Centurians synthesized early Protestant propaganda and were answered
by Cardinal Baronius from the Catholic point of view. Fox, Buchanan,
and others continued the Protestant propaganda, and the Jesuits at-
tempted to refute it. The struggle between absolute monarchs and the
middle class was enveloped in propaganda, exemplified by such things
as the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the justification of the
right of revolution. James I, Filmer, and Salamasius expounded the
divine right of kings, while Locke and Sydney defended the right of
revolution. Bossuet extolled royal absolutism, while Rousseau praised
the social contract and revolution. The French Revolution produced a
voluminous propaganda for and against the revolutionists. The most
notable example of propaganda against the Revolution was Edmund
Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. The ablest propaganda on
behalf of the Revolution was Thomas Paine's answer to Burke, in his
Rights of Man.

The United States was the result of one of the greatest campaigns of
propaganda before the first World War. James Otis, Samuel Adams,
Patrick Henry, and others led in the propaganda against the new British
imperial policy. The work of the Committees of Correspondence, in
organizing resistance to Britain, represented successful propaganda on a

548 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

scale hitherto unknown. The Declaration cff Independence is a masterly
bit of propaganda, and was intended to be such by its author, Thomas
Jefferson. Our Federal Constitution was adopted mainly as a result of
the able propaganda embodied in The Federalist. Even more vehement
propaganda against the Constitution was set forth in the Centinel Letters
and similar publications. Powerful propaganda for democracy was car-
ried on in the Jacksonian period by George Bancroft, Horace Mann,
Henry Barnard, and others.

The struggle over slavery produced a great wave of propaganda. The
Abolitionists, led by William Lloyd Garrison, published bitter anti-slavery
propaganda in The Liberator. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin was probably the most potent anti-slavery propaganda ever
written. The slave owners answered in kind, though they never produced
anything so dramatic or so widely read as Uncle Tom's Cabin. The
nearest thing to it came in our own day with the publication of Margaret
Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. The period of Reconstruction produced
bitter propaganda against the Southerners, led by Thaddeus Stevens.
President Andrew Johnson carried on hopeless counter-propaganda
against his Congressional adversaries. The Republican party waved the
"bloody shirt" for more than a generation after the Civil War, in order
to prejudice the public mind against the Democratic party as the party
of rebellion. The conservative press of our country launched a propa-
ganda campaign of unprecedented venom against William Jennings Bryan
in 1896 and accomplished his defeat thereby.

The American colonial empire arose on the crest of notorious newspaper
propaganda carried on by Hearst, Pulitzer, and others, who urged our
government to make war on Spain. The United States was brought into
the first World War on the side of the Allies by the most comprehensive
and carefully planned propaganda in history before 1939. We need only
mention characteristic atrocity tales that were spread: British nurses in
Belgium tortured and mutilated ; the hands of Belgian children cut off by
the German soldiers; Belgian women and girls ravished; Canadian
soldiers crucified; tongues of captured British soldiers torn out; cobras
tattooed on the cheeks of Entente prisoners; French juvenile war heroes
brutally shot. Other tales described the German corpse factory; the
ghoulish glee and enthusiasm of the German Crown Prince as he per-
sonally led in the looting of captured churches, palaces, and jewelry
stores ; the bombing of hospitals and hospital ships ; the favorite recrea-
tion of submarine gunners, who picked off sailors struggling in the water
after their ship had been torpedoed; and the willful German devastation
of libraries, works of art, and religious relics.15 Along with these
stories went the larger propaganda myth that Germany was solely re-
sponsible for the outbreak of the first World War. The coming of peace
produced vigorous propaganda, such as that arising out of the controversy
between President Wilson and the Senate over the desirability of our
entering the League of Nations, and the long debate over the responsi-
bility for the outbreak of the war in 1914.

15 See J. M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-1919, Yale Press, 1941.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 549

The approximately fifteen years of the "Noble Experiment" with
Prohibition brought about extensive propaganda in the battle between
th$ "Wets" and the "Drys." Other prominent examples of propaganda
since the World War have been the intermittent spasms of Red-baiting,
most notable being the orgy of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and the
deportation delirium of 1919-20, the Lusk Committee in New York State,
and the Congressional investigations by Congressmen Fish and Dies;
the propaganda carried on by the munitions makers; and that set forth
by the electric utilities in their effort to forestall or prevent government
ownership or too stringent government regulation. The presidential cam-
paign in 1928 produced political and religious propaganda unmatched
since the election of 1896; and the campaigns of 1936 and 1940 were
notable for bitter economic propaganda. The New Dealers presented
propaganda in support of the new economic experiments, while Economic
Royalists and Liberty Leaguers countered with propaganda against them.
The threat of world war after 1939 promoted vigorous interventionist and
isolationist propaganda in the United States.

This brief review of some of the outstanding examples of propaganda
in the past will suffice to demonstrate that the use of propaganda is no
novelty in human life, least of all in the history of our own country. The
propaganda of our own day differs from earlier propaganda only in its
more universal exploitation and the superior devices for making it an
overwhelming instrument of mass appeal.

Propaganda during the first World War demonstrated its enormous
efficiency in molding public opinion. The results accomplished by Ivy
Lee after 1914 in completely transforming the public attitude towards
John D. Rockefeller revealed the potentialities of the Public Relations
Counsel in influencing public opinion. Then we witnessed the remark-
able development of commercial advertising as a veritable science and
art of mass appeal. This achievement has been well described in James
Rorty's book Our Master's Voice, and Helen Woodward's It's An Art.
Both the public relations counsellors and the commercial advertisers have
made a wide use of social psychology, now available for propagandists to
an unprecedented degree, both in volume and technical accuracy. The
propagandists have also used devices and instruments of communication
hitherto unknown. In addition to the use of the press and the distribu-
tion of handbills, leaflets, pamphlets, and so on, they have been able to
exploit the telegraph, the movies, and the radio.

The most diverse and varied groups have recognized the value of
propaganda, so that today we have more than a thousand organizations
created primarily for the purpose of molding public opinion. In at-
tempts to reach the mass of Americans, it was inevitable that the intellec-
tual content of propaganda would be lowered so as to appeal to anyone
capable of understanding the simplest language. As Federal Communi-
cations Commissioner Payne once put it: "There is the danger that radio
and the movies will, in time, make us a nation of grown-up children.
Like the moving pictures, the average program of the broadcasters is ad-
dressed to an intelligence possessed by a child of twelve." Joseph Jastrow

550 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

has, indeed, accused our contemporary propagandists of trying to "mo-
ronize" the American public.

Devices and Processes of Propaganda. Clyde R. Miller, when director
of the important Institute for Propaganda Analysis, brought together
in systematic form what he regards as the seven most common devices
of contemporary propaganda:

1. The Name-Calling device.

2. The Glittering Generalities device.

3. The Transfer device.

4. The Testimonial device.

5. The Plain Folks device.

6. The Card-Stacking device.

7. The Band Wagon device.16

The name-calling device is an application of the old adage of "giving a
dog a bad name." By calling names, we associate the person or move-
ment we would disparage with something undesirable or socially disap-
proved. For example, members of the Liberty League called President
Roosevelt, directly or by implication, a Communist and a Socialist. Mr.
Roosevelt in turn designated his opponents as Economic Royalists. Re-
ttctionary employers are fond of calling John L. Lewis a Communist.
Al Smith sought to discredit President Roosevelt's financial policies by
reference to "the baloney dollar." After 1939, interventionists delighted
in calling their opponents Fifth Columnists, while the isolationists coun-
tered by designating the interventionists as war-mongers.

The use of glittering generalities is an exploitation of what Stuart Chase
has called "the tyranny of words." The propagandist seeks to invest his
program with dignity and nobility by associating it with worthy but
vague sentiments, like love, generosity, truth, and honor. Through this
association he hopes to achieve spontaneous and universal approval for
his special interest. Reactionary employers seek to undermine collective
bargaining by attacking strikes through an appeal for "the right to work."
Father Coughlin cloaks his vigorous quasi-Fascist propaganda under the
noble phrase of "social justice." President Roosevelt associates the New
Deal with "the more abundant life." His opponents seek to discredit it
by calling it a spendthrift economy. To them the "abundant life" be-
comes "boondoggling." Our reactionaries seek approval for their eco-
nomic program by defining it as "the American way" or by identifying
it with the preservation of the Constitution. In the winter of 1940-41,
President Roosevelt ennobled all-out aid to Britain under the guise of
spreading the Four Freedoms throughout the whole world.

By the transfer device, the propagandist tries to get prestige for his
policies by associating them with some symbol universally respected, like
God, the Cross, the flag, Uncle Sam, and so on. Journalists commonly
make use of cartoons which employ the figure of Uncle Sam, the Ameri-
can flag, or the Christian Cross in such a way as to imply that the Ameri-

16 Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Bulletin, "How to Detect Propaganda/'
November, 1937.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 551

can spirit or the Church lends support to the policies they favor. Sen-
ator Wheeler enlisted God on the side of those opposing the President's
Supreme Court reforms in 1937. Henry Wallace and other intervention-
ists invoked the blessing of God on their crusade against Herr Hitler.

By the testimonial device, the propagandist exploits the approval of
some policy or product by a person or group possessing great popular
prestige, such as the President's wife, Henry Ford, the American Legion,
the United States Chamber of Commerce, or the American Federation
of Labor. The testimonial is usually a direct eulogy of the thing or pro-
gram being promoted. It is most commonly used in commercial adver-
tisements.

An effort to appear extremely democratic, devoid of snobbery, and in
tune with the mass of Americans is called the plain folks device. Most
presidents have been photographed talking to farmers, to housewives, to
laborers, and so on. Calvin Coolidge was often photographed on a rustic
hayrake. Alf Landon returned to the home folks where he was born to
start his presidential campaign. When one of our masters of commercial
advertising, Bruce Barton, decided to enter public life, photographs
appeared showing him talking to the common man seated on a park bench,
at the wheel of a taxi, and so on. The notorious baby-kissing antics of
politicians during campaigns is another example of the plain folks device.
So are photographs of a candidate with his whole family, from his
grandfather to his grandchildren, wearing common clothes, displaying an
interest in baseball and fishing, attending convivial picnics, and so on.

The card-stacking device makes deliberate use of faulty logic or sup-
presses facts in an effort to promote a cause or candidate. It is the
combination of rigging the game and the familiar Jesuitical method of
argument through dust-throwing. Embarrassing facts are overlooked,
and the argument is shifted from major items to secondary issues. Every
effort is made to obscure the facts, to confuse and mislead. The familiar
build-up of candidates, pugilists, movie stars, and the like, by piling up
alleged virtues, is another example of the card-stacking procedure.

An excellent instance of card-stacking was the statement made by a
rich and powerful university president in the spring of 1942, endeavoring
to ridicule the attempt of labor to preserve the forty-hour week. He
stated that he had long wished for a "forty-hour day." What he failed
to state was that, if he had a forty-hour day, he would be spending part
of it in pleasant conversation, golf, banquets, travel and the like, not in
grueling work in a foundry. Nor did he take the trouble to point out
that the average coalmincr would probably delight in a forty-hour day if
he could spend part of it in leisure pursuits.

The band wagon device attempts to get approval of a candidate or pro-
gram by an appeal to the notion that "everybody's doing it." It is an
application of the adage that "nothing succeeds like success." The aver-
age man wants to follow the crowd. If he can be made to feel that a
certain cause is bound to win, he supports it. The opposition is repre-
sented as hopeless and unpopular. It was a common quip, after the elec-
tion of 1936, that Vermont and Maine were no longer in the Union, and

552 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AKlD CENSORSHIP

their representatives in Congress were jokingly referred to as ambas-
sadors. After the election, certain newspapers which had vehemently
opposed Roosevelt during the campaign, suddenly found him to be a
second Jackson. In the campaign over our entry into the second World
War, the interventionists tried to show that only a few poor deluded
ignoramuses and Fifth Columnists supported isolation, while the isola-
tionists appealed to the various polls to prove that the majority were
against our entry.

In all propaganda devices there is a strong emotional component. This
fact has been emphasized by Professor Miller:

Observe that in all these devices our emotion is the stuff with which propa-
gandists work. Without it they are helpless; with it, harnessing it to their
purposes, they can make us glow with pride or burn with hatred, they can make
us zealots in behalf of the program they espouse.17

In other words, the propagandists appeal to our hearts rather than our
heads. And, as we have pointed out above, such appeal as is made to our
heads is of a relatively low order, so designed that it may attract even
the lowest intellectual level and the least literate elements of our popu-
lation. The propagandists have studied our mental tests and have
learned that at least half the American population falls into the levels of
dull normals and morons.

To supplement this list of basic "devices of propaganda," the Institute
for Propaganda Analysis has enumerated some eleven closely related
mental processes or mechanisms that are most frequently exploited by
propagandists in using the foregoing devices. These processes are:

1. Custom.

2. Simplification.

3. Frustration.

4. Displacement.

5. Anxiety.

6. Reinforcement.

7. Association.

8. Universals.

9. Projection.

• 10. Identification.
11. Rationalization.18

We may illustrate what is meant by these mental processes, so con-
genial to propaganda activities, by both foreign and domestic examples.
The skillful propagandist builds up his propaganda in terms of the folk-
ways, customs, and habits of his own society. For example, Hitler
builds on such popular German themes as patriotism, discipline, loyalty,
and leadership. In our counter-propaganda, we properly stress freedom,
democracy, and liberty.

The more simple allegations and slogans can be made, the more effec-
tive they are. Hitler has contended that Germany lost the first World

17 Miller, loc. dt., p. 3.

18 Bulletin, "Propaganda for Blitzkrieg," August 1, 1940.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 553

War simply because of the treason of Jews and Communists. Opponents
of President Roosevelt contended that the United States was being
wrecked because the budget was not balanced. His friends asserted that
all the trouble arose from the fact that capital was ganging up and con-
ducting a "strike of capital."

The frustration of the oppressed in Russia, Germany, and Italy after
the first World War made it easy for totalitarian propagandists to capi-
talize on the popular psychology. Hitler made particularly good use of
the Treaty of Versailles as a symbol of German frustration and promised
to destroy it. In his first campaign for the Presidency, Franklin D.
Roosevelt exploited the sense of frustration on the part of millions of
Americans in the depth of the depression with his appeal for the "for-
gotten man" — forgotten by the business leaders and the Republican
party. Mr. Roosevelt's own sense of frustration after the Supreme Court
battle led to his shift of interest to the foreign field and his suggestion
that we "quarantine the aggressors."

The displacement process resembles "buck-passing" and the search for
scapegoats. Hitler's use of Jews and Communists as scapegoats to ex-
plain German miseries is well-known. After the second World War
began, Hitler and Churchill regarded each other as the sole devil in
world affairs. When the French and British failed to stop the Germans
in May and June, 1940, they turned on King Leopold and made him the
scapegoat for Allied collapse.

Propaganda purposes are served by both stirring up and allaying
anxiety. Hitler has aroused much anxiety abroad by his Fifth Column
organization, while he reduced anxiety at home by his treaty with Russia
in August, 1939, which removed for the time being the danger of a two-
front war.

Any program or movement frequently needs psychological and moral
reinforcement. Hitler has reinforced the Nazi philosophy and program
by numerous parades, demonstrations, and education. The sense of
danger in the United States was further stimulated by the encourage-
ment of civilian defense activities, and anticipatory preparations against
enemy bombings and invasions.

Association of ideas is used for propaganda efforts. Hitler has asso-
ciated democracy with plutocracy and, at other times, with the contra-
dictory smear of communism. President Roosevelt associated promi-
nent isolationists with the "Copperheads." (The name of this poisonous
snake was given during the Civil War to Northern sympathizers with the
Southern cause.) After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt happily asso-
ciated his opponents with defeatism, and branded them "Sixth Column-
ists." This process of propaganda is, obviously, closely related to the
name-calling device.

The use of universals or expansive generalities is illustrated by Hitler's
assertion of the comprehensive superiority of the "Aryan" race and cul-
ture. A more noble universal is President Roosevelt's ideal of the Four
Freedoms as a program for world-wide utopia.

A clever master of propaganda may project his views into the con-

554 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

sciousness of a whole people. Hitler created a Nazi program out of his
own convictions and then imposed them upon Germany through persistent
propaganda. President Roosevelt was almost equally successful with the
New Deal arid preparedness before our entry into the second World War.

Through identification of a program with a person of great prestige, a
large following can be gathered and great repute attached to the move-
ment. Hitler built up the early Nazi movement around the personality,
or symbol, of Ludendorff. Later he made use of Siegfried and other
heroes of German mythology. President Roosevelt secured even greater
prestige for his foreign policy by identifying it with God's will. In his
remarkable speech of May 8, 1942, Vice-President Wallace identified the
war of the United Nations with the notion of a crusade for humanity
under divine leadership: "The people's revolution is on the march and
the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it. They cannot
prevail for on the side of the people is the Lord."

Rationalization is a process of congenial self-deception. For example,
Hitler rationalized away German defeat in 1918 as a treasonable Jewish-
Communist plot and disposed of German mistakes after 1918 as wholly
due to the Treaty of Versailles. Republicans rationalized their timidity
and conservatism from 1929 to 1933 by holding that "deflation" had
worked and that prosperity was actually coming back around the corner
when the New Deal drove her into a side alley. The decay of the New
Deal after 1937 was rationalized by its supporters as being a result of
the malevolence of reactionaries at home and Hitler abroad.18a

Political Propaganda. We may now review very briefly certain char-
acteristic types of propaganda in various fields of American life, mainly
for the purpose of illustrating the diversity and potency of this new
force in social control. Let us first turn to propaganda in politics.19

Usually several of the propaganda devices are used in a campaign.
In the campaign against the New Deal, for instance, an address made
under the auspices of the Liberty League in Washington in January,
1936, by Alfred E. Smith, combined the devices of glittering generalities,
card-stacking, and name-calling by insisting that the American people
must choose between the way of Moscow and the American way, laid
down by the Fathers in the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia.
There was no suggestion in Mr. Smith's speech that the philosophy of
the Liberty League was almost as far from that of the Constitutional
Convention as the tenets of Moscow. The direct implication was that
the New Deal was following the pattern of the Soviet Union. Mr. Smith's
speech also illustrated the fact that propaganda devices, to be successful,
must be used to give an impression of factuality. To compare the New
Deal with Moscow was so absurd that the Smith speech fell flat and did
not provoke the secession from the Democratic party which the enemies
of Mr. Roosevelt had predicted.

i8aWe do not, obviously, equate Nazi and American propaganda. The former
is evil and the latter is good, but the same devices and mechanisms are used in both,
10 Sec F. C. Bartlett, Political Propaganda, Cambridge University Press, 1940,

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 555

For the New Deal, Secretary Ickes and Attorney-General Jackson
once launched a vigorous propaganda against monopoly, as a barrage
under which the Administration investigation of monopoly could proceed
safely. David Cushman Coyle made clever use of the transfer device by
presenting the New Deal program as a "national or human budget," of
far greater importance than any mere treasury budget. In his address
at the opening of Congress on January 4, 1939, President Roosevelt made
a very effective use of the transfer device by linking up the New Deal
with patriotism, national defense, and religious idealism.

The resources of the telegraph for mass propaganda were first made
apparent by Father Coughlin, when he induced thousands of his radio
listeners to deluge Congress with telegrams urging it to vote against the
entrance of the United States into the World Court. Father Coughlin
became generally credited with having thus influenced enough Senators
to defeat the proposal to have the United States join the World Court.
Later the electric utilities showered Congress with card-stacking tele-
grams when the Wheeler-Rayburn bill to curb holding companies was
under consideration. In this case, the propaganda was rather irrespon-
sible, since names were taken at random from telephone directories and
signed to telegrams without any knowledge or intent on the part of the
persons whose names were signed.

In the drive against the Supreme Court reform bill of 1937 and the
Administrative Reorganization Bill of 1938, Father Coughlin was joined
by newspaper columnists like Mark Sullivan, David Lawrence, Paul
Mallon, Boake Carter, and Dorothy Thompson, and by powerful pub-
lishers, such as Frank Gannett. . They urged their readers to put pres-
sure on Congress by writing and wiring for the defeat of the bills. Doro-
thy Thompson and the Scripps-Howard newspapers made much use of
name-calling and card-stacking by calling the Administrative Reorgan-
ization Bill "the Dictatorship Bill." Congressmen were deluged with
letters and telegrams. The period has been described by Secretary Har-
old L. Ickes as one of "mail-order government." Its dangers have been
well summarized by Secretary Ickes:

The danger in mail-order government must be apparent to all. If one small
but none too scrupulous group could stir the passions of the unthinking to mobbish
action, as was done in this instance, other groups can incite other mobs on other
occasions. The right to petition for a redress of grievances and the right to
express oneself on any matter of common interest are precious rights that should
be jealously guarded. But the right to petition Congress is based upon the
presumption of a thoughtful and informed consideration of the subject-matter
involved.20

It may be observed, however, that when "mail-order government" got
behind the interventionist movement with which Mr. Ickes was in thor-
ough sympathy after 1939, he found it eminently satisfactory.

Political propaganda has gone beyond the mere matter of supporting
or opposing particular laws or political policies. Whole systems of gov-

20 Harold L. Ickes, "Mail-Order Government," Collier's, February 18, 1939, p. 15.

556 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

ernment are today founded upon and supported by propaganda. For
example, the government of Nazi Germany 21 has a definite Ministry for
Propaganda, presided over by the remarkably capable and cynical Dr.
Joseph Goebbels, who has openly expressed his contempt for mass intelli-
gence and has shown himself a master in manipulating the mass-mind.
The Institute of Propaganda Analysis summarized the methods of the
Nazi propaganda in its Bulletin of May, 1938, devoted to "Propaganda
Techniques of German Fascism." The name-calling device, which ap-
peals to hate and fear, was utilized in the denunciation of the former
Republic, radicals (all of whom are regarded as Communists), liberals,
and, above all, the German Jews, whom the German people had been
made to hate as the cause of all their miseries.

Use was made of glittering generalities in arousing the patriotic senti-
ments of the Germans. Much was made of vague and high-sounding
words such as "honor," "sacrifice," "leadership," and "comradeship."
An appeal was made to the historic traditions and alleged racial purity of
the Germans — for example, the Nazi slogan of "One Race, One Nation,
One Leader." Stress was laid upon the fact that the Nazis worked only
for the common good and the deliverance of German national honor from
the disgrace of the first World War and the Treaty of Versailles.

The transfer trick was exploited to confer prestige and reverence upon
Hitler and his associates. An effort was made to invest Hitler with the
qualities of divinity. The prestige and authority of God were freely
used to buttress the personnel and policies of the Nazis, with regard to
both the domestic program and foreign policy.

The testimonial subterfuge was copiously employed to give prestige to
Nazi policies. Thus nothing was right which Hitler did not approve,
and nothing could be wrong which he sanctioned. The propagandists
then saw to it that Hitler conferred his blessing upon all major policies.

The plain folks strategy was used to give the Nazi regime popular sup-
port. Hitler was photographed fondling babies. The Nazi leaders were
represented as good family men.

An elaborate censorship system enabled the Nazis to make wide use of
the card-stacking device. Only those things could be said that the gov-
ernment wished to have said. The country was thus spoon-fed and the
opposition had no opportunity to correct false impressions. Finally, the
band wagon procedure was thoroughly exploited in great patriotic demon-
strations like the Nazi congresses at Nuremberg. These gave the impres-
sion that everybody in Germany was heartily behind Hitler and his
policies.

The result of all this was the promotion of a close mental unity among
the German people and the development of a common front in favor of
Nazi policy at home and abroad. But, at the same time, it suppressed
objective thinking and thus impaired initiative and inventiveness.

Fascism has many supporters in the United States, and they have

21 See below, p, 582.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 557

profited by the impressive example of what propaganda was able to
accomplish in the destruction of democracy in Germany. The imitation
of Nazi methods by American sympathizers is considered at length by
the Institute for Propaganda Analysis:

Today in the United States there are some 800 organizations that could be
called pro-fascist or pro-Nazi. Some flaunt the word "Fascist" in their name, or
use the swastika as their insignia. Others — the great majority — talk blithely of
democracy, or ("Constitutional Democracy") but work hand in glove with the
outspokenly-fascist groups and distribute their literature. All sing the same tune
— words and music by Adolf Hitler, orchestration by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbcls,
the Reich-minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. That song be-
witched the German people, as the song of the Lorelei bewitched the mariners of
antiquity; it lured them headlong onto the reefs of fascism. It can be sung with
variations, but always the refrain is "Jew!" and "Communist!"23

The would-be American dictators are imitating the methods of the
Nazi dictators, particularly in their use of card-stacking, testimonials, and
name-calling. The card-stacking technique is used to make the words
Jew and Communist particularly odious: "The American Fascists, like
the German Nazis, have no qualms whatsoever about telling out-and-
out lies, misquoting documents, or even forging documents." Well-known
Americans, such as Chief Justice Hughes, Matthew Woll, the late Mayor
Hylan, and former President Garfield, are invoked for testimonials
against the Jews. There is also card-stacking, for these quotations fail
to hold water:

It would be impossible to identify these men with Jew-baiting, and, in fact,
the quotations cited make no mention whatsoever of the Jews, even by implica-
tion. The reasoning of the Silver-shirts, however, is something like this; Garfield
and Hylan attacked the bankers, they must have been Jew-baiting because most
bankers are Jews; Justice Hughes said that voters should be well informed, he
must have been attacking the Jews because voters are ill-informed and the Jews
own most of the newspapers in the United States.23

As the editors point out, the card-stacking technique in the foregoing
quotation is well illustrated by the fact that very few bankers are Jewish;
that only an insignificant number of newspapers are owned and operated
by Jews ; and that the Communist party here is headed mainly by Ameri-
cans who could qualify as full-blooded Aryans in Germany itself.

The invariable procedure of the American Fascists is to resort to name-
calling when they are attacked. When Dorothy Thompson assaulted the
Nazi government in Germany, the Silver-shirts asserted that her real
name is Dorothy Thompson Levy. When Governor Alf M. Landon of
Kansas attacked Rev. Gerald Winrod, alleged leader of Fascism in that
state, the charge came right back that Landon's middle name is Mossman,
which proves that he is a Jew.

It is estimated that one voter out of every three in the United States
has been subjected directly to Fascist propaganda. While it has been

22 Bulletin, "The Attack on Democracy," January, 1939.

23 Ibid., pp. 2-5.

558 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

fed out directly by American organizations, it has been shown that some
have had direct tie-up with Germany and made use of the tons of Nazi
propaganda which were being shipped to this country.

After 1939 a comprehensive anti-Fascist propaganda was developed by
interventionists, some of their organizations having high-sounding titles
like "The Friends of Democracy." Their intolerance and their flagrant
use of all the cherished Nazi propaganda methods gave point to the late
Huey Long's prediction that Fascism would come to America in the
name of "anti-Fascism."

Propaganda also plays a dominant role in foreign affairs today.
Through propaganda, the Fascist countries got control of their foreign
policy as completely and ruthlessly as they controlled domestic political
policies. All news going into and coming out of Fascist states is thor-
oughly censored. No foreign correspondent dares to challenge this cen-
sorship if he hopes to remain in a Fascist country. The situation in
Germany is well described in a Bulletin of the Institute for Propaganda
Analysis:

If the story is considered unfriendly to Adolf Hitler, the censor may warn
the correspondent to watch his step. If the correspondent persists in sending
unfriendly stories, he will find that his news-sources are closed to him; party and
government officials will refuse to speak to him; government bureaus will refuse
to give him information. Later may come expulsion from the country.24

But progaganda in foreign policy is not, unfortunately, limited to the
dictatorships. It is a sad fact that the major European democracies ap-
parently collaborated with the Fascist countries in putting over on the
world the most notorious propaganda hoax in the history of diplomacy.
We have reference here to the official version of the diplomatic events
leading up to and including the Munich Conference of late September,
1938.

We were promised in the Allied propaganda during the first World War
that an Allied victory would put an end to secret diplomacy. Yet, there
seems to be good evidence that the most sinister secret diplomacy in mod-
ern history was carried out by these former Allied powers during 1938.

When our historians, after the first World War, demonstrated that the
Russian diplomat Alexander Isvolsky brought about the War through a
plot to secure for Russia the Straits leading out of the Black Sea, the
public was at first so Stunned as to regard any such notion as utterly
incredible. Today, this plot is so well established a fact that only the
most obtuse "bitter-enders" among historians refuse to accept it as a
commonplace of diplomatic history.

But our more astute diplomatic historians have assembled evidence
to prove that Isvolsky was a "piker" compared with Neville Chamberlain,
the Cliveden gang, Montagu Norman, the British financial Tories, and
their French stooges, when it comes to secret diplomacy and duping the
public. It now seems that the events leading up to the Munich Confer-

24 Op. cit., October 1, 1938, p. 2.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 559

ence of the end of September, 1938, were all arranged for months before
by the British Foreign Office, Germany, and Italy, with the assent of
France. The doctrine of a "Munich plot" to betray Czechoslovakia and
deceive the populace of France and Britain is well set forth in the Novem-
ber, 1938, Bulletin of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis:

In brief, the story is this: Last May [1938], if not much earlier, Neville
Chamberlain decided to buy Hitler's friendship, or at least purchase some im-
munity from his enmity; and to do this by the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. It
was a decision beset with grave risks and problems. How to keep France and
the Soviet Union from observing solemn treaties and rushing to Czechoslovakia's
defense? How to forestall an upheaval in England itself that might overthrow
Chamberlain's own government? To meet these problems called for the highest
talent in propaganda-diplomacy — card stacking on a titanic scale. The peoples
of France and Britain must be prepared to expect the horrors of war at any
split-second; and events were so ordered. Then — presto! — in that darkest hour
came the Munich Conference in which Chamberlain turned what appeared to be
certain war into "peace with honor." It was all planned and happened according
to plan.25

If this interpretation is true, it means that all of our excitement in
September, 1938, when intelligent Americans were momentarily expecting
a European war and were feverishly following the minute-by-minute
radio broadcasts, was entirely unjustified and fictitious. It was nothing
more than stage-play, which was carrying out the last phases of the plot
which had been laid, very possibly, as early as March, 1938:

According to this explanation of "the Munich plot," from the moment of
Chamberlain's decision to capitulate to Hitler, what happened in Europe was
mostly "play acting" culminating in those memorable days and nights when
millions of- Americans listened avidly to radio dispatches of the unfolding drama.
As in a drama on the stage, everything was planned, or nearly everything; the
fervent speeches, the Runciman report, the visits to Berchtesgaden and Godes-
berg, even the cablegrams which Franklin D. Roosevelt was persuaded to send
Adolf Hitler and Mussolini.

All this was arranged, if the story of the "Munich plot" is true, by Mr. Cham-
berlain or his confidential aides, arranged deliberately to stampede public opinion
into accepting and approving the Chamberlain policy of appeasement with re-
spect to Rome and Berlin. Troops were mobilized, gas masks were given to the
peoples, evacuation of Paris was begun, trenches were dug in London parks,
armies were mobilized, and the might of the British navy was gathered in the
North Sea. German passenger liners were ordered to rush back to their home
ports. Everything was done to make the British and French peoples believe
that Europe teetered on the brink of war.26

Not only have the brighter journalists and more alert historians ac-
cepted this interpretation, but, as the late Paul Y. Anderson pointed out

25 Op. cit., p. 1. Even the interpretation of Munich given in the above quotation
is somewhat misleading. Czechoslovakia was not sacrificed by Chamberlain to gain
Hitler's friendship, which was already assured by Hitler's notorious Anglophile senti-
ments. Munich was "plotted" to strengthen Hitler for the attack upon Russia which
the British Tories expected him to launch soon.

26 Ibid., p. 2.

560 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

in The Nation, it was accepted by many in high official circles in Wash-
ington:

One encounters a deepening belief in high official circles here that the Munich
betrayal was actually arranged far in advance of its public announcement, and
thut the September war scare was deliberately staged m England and France to
frighten the people of those countries into acceptance of terms which had already
been secretly agreed on. That hypothesis would serve to clarify many things
which have puzzled the world. The failure of the Germans to dig trenches in
streets and parks, to issue gas-masks by the millions, to plan the mass evacuation
of their cities, or engage in any of the spectacular preparations which terrified
London and Paris is understandable if Hitler knew there was to be no war.
Unlike Chamberlain and Daladier, he was under no compulsion to create a public
opinion. That the danger of gas attacks on London and Paris was enormously
exaggerated by the government is now admitted. Gas has not been employed
against civilians in Spain or China, for the very practical reason — upon which
experts agree — that gas is much less effective than explosives or incendiary
bombs. That the heads of the British and French governments would perpetrate
such a monstrous hoax upon their peoples is a horrifying thought, but is it any
lows horrifying than the final betrayal? I think not, and there arc others here,
far more important, who agree.27

Another hideous world war has now broken out. The foremost pub-
lic problem of our age is how to interpret it accurately and soundly. We
have new methods of warfare which are much more ingenious and efficient
than those known at any earlier age. Do we have comparable new de-
vices to enable us to ward off the deadly military involvements of our
age?

Dr. John W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education,
believed in 1938 that we did. In an article, "Can Discussion Muzzle the
Guns," issued by his office, he suggested that the press and the radio, with
the new facilities which they provide for discussion, might inform the
people to such a degree that they would be able to move effectively against
our entry into the war while there was yet time. War could no longer
sneak up on us unawares. Dr. Studebaker used President Roosevelt's
message to Hitler and Mussolini in September, 1938, as an illustration of
how the radio and press have annihilated time and space, when it comes
to giving the public information on a great world crisis:

Within six hours from the time a typewriter had made the final draft, that
message was the topic of discussion in all parts of the civilized world. People
heard it on loud-speakers, then read it in the morning newspapers. This strange
and yet powerful thing we call public opinion was feeding on that message. In
the time that it would have taken Paul Revere to ride less than 100 miles with
his message, the appeal of the President of the United States for peace went
around the globe and became a part of world public opinion. This serves merely
to illustrate how we have annihilated time and made it possible for people to get
an accurate and exact statement of an important message together with clarify-
ing comment on its implications for peace or war.28

Never before in the history of man were the apparent facts of a world
crisis so speedily and comprehensively presented to the public. It was a

27 Nation, November 19, 1938, pp. 52S-529.

28 Op. cit., pp. 1-2.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 561

moment of impressive mass education on the most critical issue of the
day:

Historical facts were marshaled and presented to us in order that we might
understand the background of the situation. Conflicting opinions and views were
presented from all parts of the world. The issue was approached from every
angle and sharpened by critical comment. We learned much in a very short
time. This achievement in making the major crisis in this decade vivid and
understandable to the masses of people calls for the unreserved praise of edu-
cators. But it calls for more than praise. In my judgment, it is the responsi-
bility of the educational forces to keep the discussion going and to prepare for
better use of the press and radio in organized education in the future.29

Dr. Studebaker contended that we must not only make sure that this
sort of public discussion will go on in future crises, but must also take
steps to see that it will be continued in the interval between such major
disturbances. We must understand and discuss the issues which underlie
war as well as military crises. Otherwise, the latter will become ever
more frequent and more menacing.

There is much to be said for Dr. Studebaker's contentions, but the actual
technique of modern mass discussion holds within it grave dangers, as well
as new promise. This was well illustrated by the very crisis of Septem-
ber, 1938. The public was quickly educated as to the external and
superficial events of the crisis, but in this very process they were grossly
deceived as to the fundamental facts. We all thought that war was
imminent at any moment. Now we know that it was a fake crisis and
that all the diplomatic maneuvers were only stage play, designed to
deceive a gullible public.

Moreover, it was hard to undo the damage. Our scholars now know
the truth, but the masses still believe the "story for babes," as it came
over the air late in September, 1938. There is no way whereby the real
facts, now known by scholars, can be set forth with the same comprehen-
sive effect and wide publicity as was the stage play which most of us
accepted as accurate at the time of the Munich Conference. The stage
play carried on by Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler and Mussolini was
spread to the four corners of the world by the press, radio, and newsreels.
The striking articles of Ladislas Farago and Frederick L. Schuman,
which have correctly revealed the hoax, are hidden away in Ken Maga-
zine, the New Republic, and Events, and other excellent magazines read
by only a small section of the public. This illustrates how an honest
effort to inform the public and discuss world affairs may quite unwit-
tingly become the means for gross misinformation and dangerous decep-
tion.

The events of 1940-1941 revealed the pathetic inadequacy of Dr.
Studebaker's hoped-for safeguards against our involvement in war. At
the very moment when open-minded discussion was most necessary, it
became all but impossible. The press, radio, and movies were heavily
weighted with interventionist propaganda. "Name-calling" was rampant.

™Ibid., p. 2.

562 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

Objective analysis of the real issues was difficult, and it was all but impos-
sible to get it before the mass of the people. Hence it was possible for
the Roosevelt administration in Washington to move gradually, step
by step, on the road to war and to block or undermine any serious move
for peace. Then, when the final crisis came on December 7, 1941, it
dropped on us with such speed and shocking power as to rule out any
possibility of sane discussion.

The most appalling aspect of the power of propaganda in foreign affairs
is its current effect, now that the second World War has finally broken
out. The propaganda designed to involve us in war was far more potent
than it was between 1914 and 191 7.30 Propaganda methods had been
much improved in their technique. The belligerents had more and better
things with which to stir up our emotions. They also had far more
numerous and potent communication facilities to make use of.

When the first World War broke out, the propagandists were still only
amateurs at the game. But after 1939 they had at their disposal all
the lessons about successful propaganda they learned during the previous
twenty-five years. This material had been gathered together in sys-
tematic fashion by Harold D. Lasswcll and others. The propagandists
of the present war also had all the accumulated skill, experience, and
strategy of commercial advertising and propaganda, which had been
mastered since 1918, to draw upon. Hence, "propaganda technique in
wartime" was far more adroit and ruthless after hostilities broke out in
September, 1939.

There were,also more and better things to exploit. In 1914-17, those
who sought to propagandize our country had to stick pretty closely
to Germany and the Kaiser. But millions of Americans were of German
descent and the Kaiser was a highly respected person in this country, as
late as July, 1914. In June, 1913, William Howard Taft had called him
the greatest friend of world peace in the previous quarter of a century.
Theodore Roosevelt said that the Kaiser aided him more than any other
monarch in promoting world peace. Nicholas Murray Butler outdid
them all by asserting that, if the Kaiser had been born in the United
States, he would have been made President by acclamation without even
waiting to be nominated and elected.31

Fascism, National Socialism, Mussolini, Hitler, Japan and the "Yellow
Peril" have provided far more numerous and effective things to denounce
than Germany and the Kaiser. The propagandists of 1914-1917 were
able to make devils out of the German people and a gorilla out of the
Kaiser. What they have been able to do with Fascism, Hitler, and
Mussolini, to say nothing of Japan and the Yellow Peril, almost defies
rational description. And they were able to do about as well with the
"Red Menace," "purges," and Stalin before June 22, 1941.

30 See Porter Sargent, Getting Us into War, Sargent, 1941.
aiSee The New York Times, June 8, 1913.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 563

If the propagandists have had better things to denounce, they also
surely have had far more varied and effective agencies of publicity. In
the first World War, Lord Northcliffe, Sir Gilbert Parker, George Creel,
and their like, had to rely almost wholly upon the printed page to spread
their falsehoods and line up the "suckers." Today, along with the print-
ing-press, we have the radio and newsreels, to say nothing of the prob-
ability that television will be extensively installed before the second
World War comes to an end. Hence, impressive and pervasive as war-
time propaganda may have been during the first World War, it was only
an amateurish flurry compared with what we have had since the second
World War came along.33

In order to combat Axis, and "Fifth" and "Sixth" Column propaganda,
information agencies were set up in the Federal Government at Washing-
ton. The most important were the Office of Coordinator of Information,
under Col. William J. Donovan; the Division of Government Reports,
presided over by Lowell Mellett; and the Office of Facts and Figures,
under the direction of Archibald MacLeish. There are numerous other
cooperating bureaus and agencies. Strong pressure was exerted to create a
supreme head of official information about the war, and late in June, 1942,
the Office of War Information was created with Elmer Davis at its head.

The first important propaganda pamphlet against our enemies was
issued in March, 1942, by the Office of Facts and Figures, and was en-
titled "Divide and Conquer." It was an able blast, directed against
Hitler rather than the Japanese, and could fill Americans with pride as
they realized that we can match Herr Goebbels at his own game. Espe-
cially clever, adroit, and timely was the masterly use of the card-stacking
device (p. , 14) , in listing all the more important potential arguments
against Administration policy and then attributing them to Axis sources.
In this way, critics could be identified with foreign propaganda or domes-
tic defeatism, and thus quickly silenced. The technique was almost
immediately applied to Father Coughlin, and it brought speedy results,
including the suspension of his paper, Social Justice.

While our attention is usually directed to propaganda carried on by
war-mongers and munition makers, there has also been much propaganda
carried on for peace. This may take on all forms, from the dignified
and scholarly monographs issued by the World Peace Foundation, which
was created by the late Edward Ginn, to the spectacular but effective
campaign of the World Peaceways, which put on peace parades and
demonstrations in most American cities of importance and also carried
on an extensive advertising campaign in behalf of peace. Incidentally,
this peace campaign was financed by a private commercial corporation,
the Squibb Drug Company, which sought thereby to create a favorable

82 On propaganda in the second World War, see Sargent, op. cit.; F. A. Mercer and
G. L. Fraser, Modern Publicity in War, Studio Publications, 1941; Cedric Larson,
Official Information for America at War, Rudge, 1942; John Hargrave, Words Win
Wars, Gardner, Darton, 1940; and Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propa*
ganda and the United States, Yale University Press, 1940.

564 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

impression towards Squibb products on the part of American peace lovers
— a clever use of the transfer device.

Propaganda in Business. The broad field of business probably exploits
propaganda more widely than any other element in modern society. We
are, of course, familiar with the use of propaganda in every type of adver-
tising, whether printed, pictorial or vocal.33 In commercial advertising,
especially wide use is made of glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial
and the band-wagon devices. Even reverse card-stacking is em-
ployed. There have been uncovered, for example, malicious whispering
campaigns against manufacturers of certain leading brands of cigarettes.
A few years ago the whispers suggested that one prominent tobacco firm
employed lepers in making its cigarettes. Another whispering campaign
insinuated that a tobacco company was donating money liberally to the
support of the Nazi regime in Germany. There was not the slightest
foundation in fact for these whispering campaigns. But investigators
incidentally discovered that there are actually commercial propaganda
organizations which specialize in inventing and circulating such malicious
rumors and gossip. This is probably the lowest level to which propa-
ganda has fallen in our day.

Another type of propaganda in the field of business has been the attack
of reactionary business upon the New Deal, and particularly upon its
labor policy. The card-stacking device has been exploited in the oft-
repeated assertion that the depression was really ended by November,
1932, and that the election of Mr. Roosevelt only set business back and
retarded recovery. Equally a product of card-stacking was the charge
that the business recession of 1937 was due to the failure of the New Deal
to balance the budget. As a matter of fact, the recession was hastened
and augmented by governmeYital economies, made as a sop to big busi-
ness in an attempt to balance the budget.

The attacks upon the labor movement have made a clever use of glit-
tering generalities, card-stacking, and the testimonial device. The glit-
tering slogan of "the right to work" and the transfer device, the "American
way," have both been invoked against the CIO and the Wagner Act.
Reactionary industrialists have particularly exploited the program of the
so-called Mohawk Valley Plan, which embodies all of the familiar propa-
ganda devices.84 Indeed, the whole Mohawk Valley Plan revolves about
the substitution, so far as possible, of propaganda for bullets in battling
labor unionism. Among the outstanding tenets of the Mohawk Valley
Plan, originally drawn up by an able public relations counsellor, are the
following: (1) union leaders are to be denounced as radical agitators;
(2) the employers are to be identified with the principles of law and
order; (3) the citizens and police are to be organized in such a fashion

83 See Helen Woodward, It's an Art, Harcourt, Brace, 1938.

84 The term "Mohawk Valley Plan" arose from the fact that the program was first
worked out and applied in the Mohawk Valley plants of the Remington-Rand Com-
pany.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 565

as to bring both public opinion and physical force to bear upon strikers;
(4) much publicity is to be given to a "back to work" movement, indi-
cating that the strike is failing; (5) the "back to work" movement should
be staged theatrically at the proper moment, with all possible publicity
given to it; (6) news should be manipulated so as to create the impression
that the strikers are a lawless lot, endeavoring to obstruct the right of
every American to work: and (7) as much publicity as possible should be
given to the assertion that the strike has failed, whether this be the truth
or not. For the most part, employers utilizing the Mohawk Valley for-
mula have arranged to have their publicity handled by some skillful pub-
lic relations firm.

The counter-testimonial device was used by the Little Steel officials in
battling the Wagner Act. George Sokolsky was played up as a syndi-
cated columnist in a number of American newspapers.85 He posed as an
impartial authority on labor problems. Hence, what he wrote against
the CIO had unusual prestige, as presumably an authoritative and im-
partial view of any labor question. But it was brought out that he had
the backing of the National Association of Manufacturers, operating
through the public relations house of Hill & Knowlton, of Cleveland,
Ohio.SGa

In its attack upon so-called radicalism, business has resorted to the
name-calling device, as well as to the use of the counter-transfer, by
denouncing anything allegedly radical as "un-American." The Dies
Committee, investigating un-American activities, has been flagrantly
guilty of name-calling, transfer and card-stacking. A good example of
the latter was the calling of Homer Martin, a bitter opponent of radicals,
to testify relative to Communism in the CIO.

One of the most obvious examples of card-stacking in the whole range
of contemporary business propaganda is the following paragraph from a
speech made by Bruce Barton, a leading advertising magnate, before the
Illinois Manufacturers7 Association on May 12, 1936. He thus tried to
rationalize and justify the inequalities of income and power under the
capitalistic system:

Any man in this room who has served on the handicap committee of a golf
club has learned something of the curious involutions of the human heart. The
handicap system is an instrument of social justice. It recognizes the hollowness
of that ancient lie that all men are created free and equal. A golf club knows
that all men are not created free and equal. It knows that there are a few men
out of every generation who, by native talent, are able to play in the seventies.
That there are a few more, who because of youthful opportunity or self -sacrificing
practice, can score in the eighties, that a somewhat larger number, by virtue of
honest lives and undying hope, manage to get into the nineties. But beyond these
favored groups lies the great mass of stnigglers, who, however virtuous their pri-
vate lives, however noble their devotion to their task, pound around from trap
to trap and never crack a hundred. If the handicaps can be reasonably fair

85 For an appraisal of Mr. Sokolsky as a labor expert, see Robert Forsythe, Reading
from Left to Right, Covici-Friede, 1938, pp. 122 ff.
85aSee Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Bulletin, September, 1938, pp. 65-66.

566 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

and honest, a spirit of wholesome endeavor and mutual good feeling results. If
the poor players are unfairly handicapped they will protest and throw out
the officers. If, on the other hand, the good players are too much burdened they
-will not compete. The management of the dub passes into the hands of the
dubs; the club is likely to lose tone and eventually break up.36

The use of the card-stacking device by Mr. Barton in the above
statement has been clearly exposed by Robert A. Brady, one of our lead-
ing critical experts on the subject of propaganda:

Tfc apparently has not occurred to Mr. Barton that, however satisfactory he
may find his illustration for purposes of explaining variations in human ability,
it is completely inverted when applied to the facts of relative economic oppor-
tunity. There is a handicap system in business life, but it is a handicap scheme
not for offsetting the advantage of the strong, but for underwriting it against the
weak. To make his illustration stick [as descriptive of the capitalistic system],
Mr. Barton would need u golf club where the players in the seventies were given
the handicap advantages and the players in the hundreds had handicaps assessed
against thorn. That a situation analogous to this obtains in business life is so
notoriously true that Mr. Harton will rind no one, left or right, prepared to deny
it. If the initial argument regarding ability gradations is no more than naive,
the implications drawn from it are directly contrary to indisputable fact.87

An interesting phase of the use of propaganda by business has been the
development, during the last few years, of a subtle campaign to sell the
general idea of big business and capitalism to the American public. The
"message of business" has been formulated and a program drawn up for
putting it across. This message has been very well stated by Bruce Bar-
ton: "Research, mass production, and low prices are the offspring of busi-
ness bigness and its only justification. This story should be told with all
the imagination and art of which modern advertising is capable. It
should be told just as continuously as the people are told that Ivory Soap
floats or that children cry for Castoria." 88 The National Association of
Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and other or-
ganizations of business, as well as the Ford Motor Company, have taken
Mr. Barton's advice to heart and have organized skillful and comprehen-
sive propaganda programs designed to sell business to the country. The
comprehensiveness and subtlety of this propaganda campaign can only be
comprehended after a careful perusal of the articles on "Business Finds
Its Voice," by S. H. Walker and Paul Sklar, published in Harper's*9

While all the devices of propaganda have been utilized in this program
of selling business to the American people, special use has been made of
glittering generalities and the transfer devices. For example, one of the
leading slogans in the propaganda campaign has been that "What serves
progress, serves America," the implication being that big business renders
an outstanding service to progress. Of late, big business has done much

36 From The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, by Robert A. Brady. Copy-
right 1937 by Robert A. Brady. By permission of The Viking Press, Inc., New York
Pp. 74-75.

37 Ibid., p. 75.

38 S. H. Walker and Paul Sklar, "Business Finds Its Voice: A New Trend in Public
Relations," Harper's, January, 1938, p. 115.

»8 January, February and March, 1938. See also Woodward, It's an Art, Chap. 20.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 567

along this line of trying to identify its policies with "the American way"
of doing things. In so doing, they have been helped greatly by the Dies
Committee investigating so-called un-American activities. Congressman
Dies has been just as much interested as big business in trying to identify
progressivism and labor unionism with things "un-American,"

Big business has made the most of the facilities of the press, the movies,
and the radio in selling business to the American public. The National
Association of Manufacturers syndicated to the newspapers a daily edi-
torial feature, known as "You and Your Nation's Affairs," a weekly
"Industrial Press Service," and a cartoon known as "Uncle Abner." All
of these stress the social contributions of business, the virtues of com-
petition, and the evils of government interference. The National Asso-
ciation of Manufacturers has also issued a series of films, among which
are "The Light of a Nation," "Men and Machines," "The Floodtide,"
"The Constitution," and "American Standards of Living." These films
are designed to discredit radicalism, to controvert the theory that ma-
chines destroy jobs, to denounce government spending, to defend free
competition, and to extol the high standards of living enjoyed under the
"American way" of the open shop. Nothing is said about the fact that
three quarters of our American families could not buy enough to eat
under the "American way" even at the height of the Coolidge prosperity.
The most popular radio program distributed and exploited by the Na-
tional Association of Manufacturers was the "The American Family
Robinson," which extolled the virtues of free business enterprise and
denounced the evils of labor unionism and governmental interference. In
its radio programs the business propagandists make special use of the
small independent stations, where they escape any editorial supervision
and find great willingness to use the material supplied.3""

Another effective radio program in behalf of big business was the
"Ford Sunday Evening Hour," which featured the talks of William J.
Cameron, who handles public relations for Mr. Ford. Mr. Cameron
made clever use of all the propaganda devices. By use of the transfer
device, he identified the "Ford way" with the "American way." The
plain-folks device was much utilized and Mr. Ford's homely and bucolic
ways were played up frequently. The music of the hour usually ended
with some good old hymn, popular in rural areas. Glittering generalities
were employed in identifying the Ford policy with such virtue words as
freedom, independence, initiative, industry, truth, and loyalty. Card-
stacking was resorted to in attacks on governmental interference. Mr.
Cameron never mentioned the fact that the highways, built at govern-
ment expense, have enormously facilitated the growth of the motor indus-
try. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis remarks that Mr. Cameron
implied that Mr. Ford is so little interested in profits that "it makes
hard-fisted money makers wonder why Mr. Ford is in business at all."
Mr. Cameron was particularly insistent in his contention that modern

^ 89a por the extensive educational and propaganda activity of the National Asso-*
ciation of Manufacturers, see Bibliography of Economic and Social Study Material,
New York, N.A.M., 1942.

568 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

machines do not destroy jobs and create technological unemployment.
In short, as the Institute for Propaganda Analysis puts it: "Mr. Cameron's
talks stack the cards in favor of the Ford Motor Company and against
writers, government officials, labor leaders, and others who do not approve
of Ford policies. This obviously is what he is paid to do. He certainly
does it effectively." 40

Quite naturally, big business has made much use of public relations
counsellors, and in 1934 the National Association of Manufacturers
organized a Public Relations Committee, which has taken charge of its
campaign of selling business to the public.

The institution of the Public Relations Counsel represents the most
sophisticated and subtle development of business propaganda. The two
most distinguished masters of this type of propaganda have been Ivy Lee
and Edward L. Bernays. The success of the public relations counsellor
was first demonstrated by Mr. Lee when he was engaged to alter the
public attitude towards John D, Rockefeller in 1914. He succeeded in
transforming the public notion of Mr. Rockefeller from an avaricious
ogre into a kindly old gentleman, chiefly interested in giving away his
fortune to establish foundations for the benefit of mankind and in hand-
ing out dimes to little children in Florida.

In promoting personalities, products or movements, these public rela-
tions counsellors have found that direct and blatant propaganda is very
often more harmful than helpful. It only serves to increase the preju-
dices already in the minds of those to be converted. Therefore, an in-
direct line of approach is formulated. So-callecl Institutes are created
to give an ostensible voice of authority to the interests served. This
confers a sense of research and dignity on the propaganda which is issued.
Even reputable scholars are employed to make "studies" which seem to
support the contentions advanced in the propaganda. These are inno-
cently circulated among members of responsible local organizations,
under the guise of information rather than propaganda. In this way,
resistance is lessened and the entry of propaganda made far more subtle
and effective. As we have noted, the public relations counsellors have
been made use of rather extensively of late in attacking the labor move-
ment.

Another very sophisticated development of the public relations subtlety
has been the endowment of foundations by the rich, as a means of re-
habilitating their reputation. Much publicity has been given to their
benevolences. As Horace Coon has pointed out in his notable book,
Money to Burn,4* endowments have become a potent defense of busi-
ness, since it is alleged that all attacks upon business undermine these
humanitarian organizations, and menace the research and education
which are supported by endowments.

40 "The Ford Sunday Evening Hour," Bulletin, July, 1938, p. 4. The Ford Hour was
suspended on March 1, 1942.

41 Longmans, Green, 1938.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 569

One of the most conspicuous examples of business propaganda was
that carried on, over a decade ago, by the Electric Utilities under the
direction of the National Electric Light Association. This was brought
to light as a result of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
The propaganda was carried on primarily to check the trend of opinion
in favor of government ownership of electric utilities. It was also
sought to combat the idea of more stringent governmental regulation.
Special stress was laid upon the allegation that privately-owned electrical
utilities furnish electricity at a cheaper rate than government-owned
systems. This campaign of propaganda centered particularly upon public
education. College professors and school teachers were offered liberal
subsidies if they would write books and pamphlets favorable to the
electric utilities under private ownership. Many of them succumbed
to the bait, and some of them even prepared general textbooks on eco-
nomics approved by the N.E.L.A. It was agreed that the cost of this
propaganda should be passed on to the public, in the form of higher rates
for electricity and other increased charges. This propaganda has been de-
scribed in such books as Ernest Gruening's The Public Pays; Jack Levin's
Power Ethics; and Carl D. Thompson's Confessions of the Power Trust.

Since the second World War broke out and the United States entered
vigorously into defense industry, business has taken advantage of the
psychology of patriotism to promote its interests and discredit labor.
Special use has been made of transfer, in exploiting patriotism, and of
card-stacking, in building up a case against labor. Business has accused
labor of being unpatriotic in demanding higher wages, and has charged
labor with having sabotaged defense through strikes. Nothing was said
about how industry had frustrated defense industry through prolonged
refusal to suspend "business as usual" and go on war work; nor was any
publicity given by business to the fact that profits had grown much
faster than wages in defense industries.41* The National Association of
Manufacturers engaged Fulton Lewis Jr. as radio commentator, and
made clever use of transfer by designating him as "Your Defense Re-
porter."

At times, however, the public may directly benefit from self-interested
business propaganda. A notable instance has been the health campaign
conducted by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. This company
has conducted a beneficial health propaganda with regard to the menace
of tuberculosis, cancer, syphilis, and the like. It long antedated Surgeon-
General Parran's campaign against venereal diseases, being the first
organization really to blast public indifference and prudery in this field.
It has also been helpful in urging periodical medical examinations. That
this propaganda has also paid the company handsomely is to be seen
by the fact that, between 1909 and 1929, the Metropolitan spent $32,000,-
000 on health propaganda and saved over $75,000,000 in death payments.

41aSee Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Bulletin, "Strikes, Profits, and Defense,"
April 29, 1941, passim.

570 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

Propaganda in Religion and Education. Propaganda is carried on in
many other fields. In religion, the most active propaganda of late has
been that of the Catholic Church against Communism. Father Coughlin
has linked this up with a joint attack upon the Jews, alleging that Com-
munism is primarily the product of Jewish thinkers and leaders.42 He
has made liberal use of card-stacking, transfer, glittering generalities
and name-calling. The New York Post published "deadly parallels" be-
tween some of his remarks and speeches made by Propaganda Minister,
Goebbels, in Germany. Likewise, *thc Catholics have led the most active
moral propaganda of recent times in their drive against even mildly sala-
cious aspects of the theater, movies and periodical literature. Catholic
writers, like Margaret Culkin Banning, have, while carefully conceal-
ing their Catholic connections, written clever articles and books uphold-
ing the Catholic view on sexual matters. A good example of counter-
propaganda against such Catholic propaganda was the articles by Dr.
Leo H. Lehman on "The Catholic Church in Politics," published in the
New Republic in the latter months of 1938.

In addition to the more general religious propaganda, there arc special
religious organizations carrying on propaganda to advance a particular
policy. Such are "The Lord's Day Alliance," which has carried on an
extensive propaganda designed to perpetuate the "Blue Sunday" and to
prevent saloons, recreation places and other distracting emporia from
remaining open on Sunday. A powerful type of combined religious and
moral propaganda was conducted by the Anti-saloon League and other
organizations in defending prohibition. This propaganda is well de-
scribed by Peter Odegard in his book, Pressure Politics.

In the educational field, Mr. Hearst led a vigorous propaganda against
realistic educators for some years following 1932, making wide use of
card-stacking and name-calling. He alleged that a number of highly
reputable, and no more than liberal, educators were really "Reds," subtly
spreading Muscovite propaganda. Mr. Hearst's campaign received a
notable setback as a result of the ingenuity of Clyde R. Miller and George
S. Counts of Columbia University, and Robert K. Specr of New York
' University, who out-generaled Mr. Hearst and exposed his methods with
fatal effect. But his propaganda did result in the passage of laws in
many states requiring teachers to take loyalty oaths.43

Another way in which education, especially American higher education,
is directly linked up with the vested interests and their propaganda is the
support of private universities and endowments by representatives of big
business and finance. This enables them to make good use of the transfer
device. For example, at the dedication of the Metcalf Research Labora-
tory at Brown University, on December 28, 1938, Frederick G. Keyes of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology warned that the taxation and
public spending policies of the New Deal were a menace to science and

42 Some liberal Catholic leaders, such as Cardinal Mundelin of Chicago, repudiated
Father Coughlin.

43 See below, pp. 783-784.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 571

American higher education. He held that, if we tax great wealth, we
shall cut off the chief source of support for our institutions of higher
learning, namely, benefactions from the wealthy. In his above-men-
tioned study of foundations, entitled Money to Burn, Horace Coon has
called attention to the same situation with respect to our Foundations for
scientific research, and the like. He points out how any important pro-
gram designed to bring about economic reform is forthwith assailed as a
blow to science, learning and humanitariamsm. As we have noted above
in connection with the N.E.L.A. propaganda, prominent educators at
times deliberately sell their services to specific economic interests.

Within education itself there are powerful propaganda influences and
activities. Perhaps most important is the propaganda in favor of the
traditional and archaic curriculum, which is safe and sound from the
standpoint of the vested interests in business and education alike. Only
a small portion of the studies pursued under this system has any contact
whatever with our social and economic order. Hence, criticism of the
latter is automatically excluded. Important innovations in education,
such as Progressive Education, vocational instruction, and the like, are
represented as so many expensive and useless "frills." Liberal teachers
are accused of "indoctrination," a matter to which we give attention later.
The most publicized propaganda in behalf of reactionary educational
interests has been that carried on during the last few years by President
Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. He is not
even satisfied with the safety and soundness of the traditional curriculum,
but advocates going back to the medieval disciplines of grammar,
rhetoric, and logic. He makes use of the transfer device and of glitter-
ing generalities in his alleged ambition to promote "straight thinking/'
but it is obvious that such thinking, however "straight," will not be
directed toward any dangerous criticism of the existing order. His
theories have been thoroughly applied at St. John's College.44

Probably the most notable example of propaganda in the educational
process is super-patriotic teachings. Such instruction gives the impression
that the institutions, particularly the political institutions, of any given
country are superior to the institutions of any other country. It instills
the idea that such a country has always been right in its dealings with
other states, and has always waged just wars. This superpatriotic
instruction has reached its most absurd expression in Fascist states, but, as
Jonathan F. Scott has made clear, the democracies have also been notable
offenders in this matter.45 In spite of the warnings afforded by the first
World War and war propaganda, instruction of this sort has become far
worse since 1918 than it was before 1914. It renders almost impossible

44 See article, "Classics at St. John's Come into Their Own Once More," in Life,
February 5, 1940. President Hutchins is not a social and economic reactionary, but
seems to have derived his paradoxical educational philosophy from the occult influ-
ence of Professor Mortimer J. Adler. See the articles by John Dewey, in the Social
Frontier, January and March, 1937.

45 J. F. Scott, Patriots in the Making, Appleton-Century, 1916; and The Menace of
Nationalism in Education, Macmillan, 1926.

572 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

any objective attitude towards either domestic political institutions or
international relations.

One might observe, in passing, that even certain phases of the salutary
movement against propaganda have in themselves become a type of prop-
aganda. A good example is "the statistical mania." There is a common
tendency among certain extreme exponents of statistical research to brand
any statement which is not made in the form of statistical tables and
graphs as propaganda. Particularly is this the case if the statement
lias a liberal or progressive tone. We should all have proper respect for
statistical investigation, which is the basis of all true social science. But
statistics have themselves been a notorious instrument of propaganda,
justifying in all too many cases the old gag that there are three grades of
liars — ordinary liars, damned liars, and statisticians.46

Another form of protective propaganda, fostered in part by statistics,
is the assertion that social scientists should search for facts and then stop.
They should not use these facts as the basis for recommending desirable
social and economic reforms. Just as soon as they do this, they become
propagandists rather than social scientists. It is obvious that, so long
as this attitude prevails, social science will be "safe," and will not upset
the existing social order. This "quietism" in social science has been
effectively assailed by Robert S. Lynd of Columbia University, who be-
came well known as the author of Middletown*7

Akin to this is the propaganda against indoctrination in education.
Certain leading educators are denounced as propagandists because they
inculcate a definite type of educational philosophy. It turns out, in every
case, that these men teach a liberal type of educational philosophy.
There is almost never any criticism of educators who, even more dog-
matically, inculcate a reactionary form of educational theory. The war
against indoctrination thus turns out to be little more than subtle propa-
ganda against liberal pedagogy, making use of the devices of glittering
generalities, card-stacking and name-calling.

Propaganda and Democracy. It is obvious that propaganda holds
within itself a great menace to democracy and liberalism.48 Even in a
• country where there is the utmost freedom of speech and the press, the
exponents of democracy and liberty are at a great disadvantage. To
carry on mass propaganda requires large expenditures, and the wealthy
interests have far greater resources than the friends of democracy and
progress. They can command more space in newspapers and buy time
on the air much more generously. Moreover, such censorship as exists
in the United States in time of peace operates mainly against democratic
and liberal propaganda. Further, the wealthy alone can command the
services of the great geniuses of contemporary advertising and propa-

46 See C. A. Ellwood, Methods in Sociology, Duke University Press, 1933, Chaps, ii,
iii, v, vii.

47 See R. S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? Princeton University Press, 1939; and
H. D. Langford, Education and the Social Conflict, Macmillan, 1936.

48 H. D. Lasswell, Democracy through Publi-c Opinion, Banta, 1941.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 573

ganda. From the outset, the cards are stacked against progressive and
democratic propaganda.

In another way, propaganda is a menace to democracy. The latter de-
pends upon a clear command of the facts by the average citizen, so that
he can vote intelligently. But our contemporary propaganda either
stimulates and intensifies the existing prejudices of the ordinary citizen
or completely confuses him.49 He has no adequate fund of knowledge to
guide him amidst the overwhelming mass of conflicting types of propa-
ganda. Nor is he adequately aware of the devices of propaganda, so
that he can effectively recognize and discount them. At the very time
when extensive knowledge and clear perception are most needed by our
citizenry, neither one is available, and the mind of the average American
is simply immersed in floods of propaganda, much of which is deliberately
designed to deceive and mislead him. The nature of this confusion of the
public mind by propaganda was well illustrated by the interventionist
propaganda in 1940-41. The polls showed that over 80 per cent of the
people were opposed to our entering the European war, yet over 60 per
cent were willing to give all-out aid to Britain, even if it involved us in
war.60

The Problem of Censorship

Nature and History of Censorship. Censorship is the attempt to im-
pose restraints on the expression of ideas by human beings. There are
mental restraints, often self-restraints, which are an outgrowth of custom
and taste. But we are here concerned with official restraints. These
fall under three main headings: (1) obscenity laws, which restrain ex-
pression with regard to matters of sex and lewdness; (2) libel and slander
laws, which restrain expression with respect to persons and business con-
cerns; and (3) sedition laws, which restrict expression in respect to the
government and public officials. In addition to laws restraining ideas we
have both informal practices and legal regulations that control the publi-
cation of news in each country and its transmission by foreign corre-
spondents resident therein.

The censor is an ancient official. In Roman times he was at first the
collector of taxes. Later on he also became the arbiter of public morals.
Following the invention of printing, the censor became an official who
superintended the licensing of the press. Today he is an officer who, in
one way or another, has authority over what can be printed, produced in
the theater, shown in the films, or broadcast over the air.

In Greek and Roman times, books were rarely censored. Authors such
as Aristophanes and Juvenal freely criticized the government and society,
and writers like Sappho and Ovid produced very racy material. Occa-
sionally, however, an author was banished or otherwise punished. In the

49 Ellis Freeman, Conquering the Man in the Street, Vanguard, 1940.
so See Hadley Cantrill, "Present State and Trends of Public Opinion," The New
York Times, May 11, 1941.

574 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

medieval age, there was little systematic censorship by the Church, since
there was no serious problem in keeping dangerous ideas from literate
persons. The manufacture and sale of books were chiefly in the hands of
monks, although some secular persons engaged in the book business in
the later Middle Ages. Relatively few copies of any "dangerous" book
could be made by hand and circulated and its author could be made to
swing back into line quickly with the threat of excommunication or con-
viction of heresy. When printing came into existence, however, a whole
new set of problems arose, since thousands of copies of subversive books
and pamphlets could be quickly struck off and distributed. The answer
to this challenge to pious obscurantism was the licensing of presses, the
preparation of indices of prohibited and expurgated books, and the im-
position of heavy penalties on those who printed books without a license,
who sold forbidden books, or who had in their possession outlawed printed
material.

The first recorded licensing of the press appeared in an edict of the
Archbishop of Mainz, in 1485. The Council of Trent, in 1546, prohibited
the unlicensed printing of anonymous books and of any works on religious
subjects. In 1557, the Roman Inquisition listed many books to be burned
— beginning a long series of prohibitions issued by the Catholic church
down to our own day. The Council of Trent authorized the preparation
of an index of books forbidden to Catholics. Pope Paul IV published
the first formal Catholic Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. Pius IV
issued a much more complete index in 1562 and threatened with excom-
munication all Catholics who read any of these banned books.

In Protestant as well as Catholic countries, governments imposed severe
penalties on those who sold banned books or operated unlicensed presses.
In Catholic countries — in Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, in particu-
lar— severe punishment was meted out to those who merely possessed for-
bidden books.

The general effect of this sweeping and stupid censorship was greatly
to curtail the spread of information and the progress of enlightenment.
Protestant countries repudiated censorship most rapidly, and hence the
disastrous effects of censorship there were not so serious or prolonged.
Commenting on the Catholic Index and censorship, Preserved Smith
makes the very restrained statement that:

It is not too much to say that most of the important works of modern science,
philosophy and learning, and not a few of the chief products of Catholic piety,
have been forbidden by the church as dangerous to the faith of her children;
and that, in addition, many of the ornaments of fair letters have been tampered
with in order to protect the sensitive pride of ecclesiastics or the squeamish
prudery of priests. . . . That servile faith, bigotry, and obscurantism have been
fostered, and that science, philosophy, and liberty were long sorely hampered
in Catholic lands, is due to the Index even more than to the Inquisition.51

The more liberal intellects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
fought vigorously against the censorship of the press. Among the writers

ci History of Modern Culture, Holt, 1930, Vol. I, pp. 51S-514.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 575

who took a leading part in the campaign were John Milton, Charles
Blount; Matthew Tindal, and the leading French Philosophcs, such as
Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Helvetius. It is pretty generally conceded
that Milton's Areopagitica was the ablest of all these early books against
censorship, yet Milton consented to acting as something pretty close to a
censor for his friend Oliver Cromwell. In the United States, the cause
of the freedom of the press was taken up by Thomas Jefferson and his
associates. Notable free press cases, such as the Zenger case in the
Colony of New York in 1734, and the John Wilkes case in England over
a generation later, helped along the cause of the freedom of the press.
Holland was generally free from censorship in an era when it was almost
universal elsewhere. England permitted the law providing for the licens-
ing of the press to lapse in 1695. Sweden abolished all censorship in
1766. Frederick the Great accorded wide freedom to the press, even to
books attacking the monarch himself.

While there never was complete tolerance and freedom of the press, it
is probable that the greatest degree of freedom existed in the United
States around 1850, and in the Third French Republic between 1880 and
1914. About 1850, there were as yet no obscenity laws on the books in
the United States, the old religious and property disabilities had been
abolished, and the right of debate and petition was freely recognized.
Many of the most distinguished American literati were followers of
Fourier and other European radical idealists. The New York Tribune,
under Horace Greeley, was a radical and reformist sheet. A little later,
Greeley employed Karl Marx as his European correspondent. Abraham
Lincoln declared that the international bond of the workingman is more
sacred and binding than any other save the family bond, and William
Henry Seward was talking about a "higher law than the Constitution."
After the Civil War, the growth of plutocracy lessened the scope of free
expression in the United States. Economic dissent was discouraged, and
suppressed when possible.

In France, under the Third Republic, anticlericalism became domi-
nant, and fimilc Zola, in his realistic portraits of life, made moral candor
more facile and reputable. On the other hand, such episodes as the
Dreyfus case showed that French liberty was by no means complete.

Aside from certain obscenity statutes in the United States, to which
we shall soon make reference, the press remained relatively uncensored
until the time of the first World War. Then, there arose an almost
universal system of thorough-going censorship. After the first World
War, the censorship was relaxed to a certain degree but freedom of publi-
cation was never fully restored. With the rise of totalitarian states, since
the first World War, there has come a degree of peace-time censorship
about as stringent as that which existed during the first World War. To
this subject we shall recur later on.

There is, today, little literary pre-censorship in the United States,
namely censorship of books or newspapers before printing. Hence it has
been contended by some that there is no censorship of printed materials.

576 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

As we shall see later on, there is plenty of censorship in advance of pub-
lication in most of the European countries. Certain forms of pre-censor-
ship exist in the United States. There is a considerable amount of pre-
censorship of radio speeches and a vast amount of pre*- censor ship in the
moving-picture industry. To these matters we shall make more extended
reference later on.

Leading Types of Censors. There are today in the United States
various types of censors. First we have the voluntary, unofficial censors,
persons who use their freedom of expression in an attempt to suppress the
use of this right by persons whose ideas they do not approve. Protesting
against some printed material; play, or movie they do not like, they go
to legislators and demand censorship laws, or approach the police and
importune the latter to arrest a publisher or close a theater. While these
censors have no official authority, they exert a considerable pressure upon
the free expression of opinion by frightening authors, producers, public
speakers, and forum authorities.

Then we have the semi-official censors, namely, private individuals or
organizations who work in collaboration with the public authorities.
Notable examples are the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,
founded by the late Anthony Comstock in New York City, and the Watch
and Ward Society of Boston. They bring materials which they believe
should be censored to the attention of public authorities and obtain special
privileges in the courts in aiding the prosecutors. Another form of semi-
official censorship exists in connection with the central bureaus of
publicity, which were set up in the cabinet departments at Washington
during the first World War and have been continued since that time.
They thoroughly control the information which is given out about the
doings of the government.

Official censors in the states include the police, commissioners of licenses,
educational departments, and moving picture censors. In the federal
government, wide censorship powers are lodged with the Post Office De-
partment, Customs House officials, the Federal Communications Commis-
sion, and certain other agencies. The most important is the censorship
exerted by the Post Office Department. The latter can deny the use of
the mails to materials it does not think proper. It can also suggest the
prosecution of those who use the mails to send materials which the Post
Office Department regards as improper and forbidden. It has made wide
use of the Comstock Law of 1873 to deny the use of the mails to such
literature as birth-control information and educational and sociological
material on sex problems. It has also restrained radical publications
which possess no suspicion of obscenity. For example, it denied mailing
privileges to Jay Lovestone's paper the "Revolutionary Age." And the
action was upheld by the same Federal judge, John Munro Woolsey,
who had shown a surprising liberality with books which were alleged to
be obscene. The Post Office Department can thus exert a great restraint
upon what the public may read in all cases where distribution is chiefly
dependent upon the mails. The Customs House officials decide what

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 577

books may be admitted from abroad. The appointment of a brilliant
liberal lawyer, Huntington Cairns, to handle this phase of Customs House
activities under the Roosevelt Administration did much to promote an
intelligent administration of this responsibility.

Censorship of Books, the Theater, and Art. It is usually taken for
granted that legislation against obscene literature 52 and plays is abso-
lutely necessary to protect the public against demoralization. However,
there were no obscenity laws in the United States until after 1870. Yet
the country seemed to endure, and there was no evidence of a demoralizing
wave of obscenity anywhere. In the decade of the 'seventies, federal
obscenity statutes were passed, mainly owing to the propaganda of An-
thony Comstock, the first great American purist. His life and doings
have been chronicled by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech in their
work, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord. The federal and
state legislation on this matter has imposed frequent and extensive
censorship of books, pamphlets, and other publications alleged to contain
obscene material. The test of obscenity is the alleged primary purpose
of any publication "to incite to lustful and lecherous desire."

At present there is no sure test or pre-censorship of a publication to
give the author and publisher assurance that it will not be regarded as
obscene. The procedure is to print the material, await arrest, stand trial,
and await the verdict. If there is an acquittal, the publication is regarded
as pure. If there is a conviction, it is deemed obscene.

For a long time, publications were suppressed as obscene when isolated
passages alone were alleged to possess obscene words, even if the work as
a whole was admittedly not obscene. A broader and more sensible test
was later set up by the Court of Appeals in New York State, which ruled
that a book could not be banned just because, here and there, in its con-
tents there were alleged obscene words or phrases. The nature and
import of the book as a whole must be obscene, if it is to be banned as
such. Yet this enlightened ruling has produced neither consistency nor
common sense in censorship. Erskine Caldwell's racy and irreverent
God's Little Acre was allowed to circulate, while Arthur Schnitzler's
much more refined Hands Around was banned.

The most active organization in attempting to promote prosecutions
for obscenity has been the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,
founded by Anthony Comstock and supported liberally by J. P. Morgan
and other wealthy citizens. In our generation, it has been conducted by
John S. Sumner. It is this Society which has been responsible for the
greatest proportion of the obscenity censorship in the United States. Most
of the publications and plays which have been censored have been brought
to the attention of the public authorities by Mr. Comstock and Mr.
Sumner, who demanded summary prosecution. This may all be fit and
proper, but the Society has been allowed to exert an altogether improper

52 For attempts to censor literature, see M. L. Ernst and Alexander Lindey, The
Censor Marches On, Doubleday, Doran, 1940, Chaps. I-III.

578 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

influence upon the trial of authors and publishers prosecuted on its
initiative.53

The Society for the Suppression of Vice has from time to time given out
advance opinion on the fitness of judges, when their nomination and
election are under consideration. In this way it has sought to keep off
the bench judges with whom it disagrees on what is or is not obscene.
Moreover, its representative during obscenity trials has been allowed
about as much latitude in court as though he were the prosecuting attor-
ney. It has even branded some judges as being themselves fond of
obscenity and willing to promote the demoralization of the public. Many
judges fear such criticism and hence have been reluctant to apply to
Mr. Sumner the restrictions which could be easily imposed under the
concept of contempt of court.

The usual way in which publishers dealt with the Society's inquisition,
after it had brought a book to the attention of authorities, was to plead
guilty and take a light fine, after agreeing to withdraw the book from
publication.

However, Morris L. Ernst, a brilliant and progressive New York
attorney (and co-author of a notable book on obscenity censorship, To
the Pure) j determined to fight out obscenity cases with the Society. He
started his campaign with the case of Mary Ware Dennett's able and
dignified pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life, in 1929. He carried the case
to the Federal Court, and Judges Hand, Swan, and Chase ordered the
book released by the Post Office Department and also praised its contents.
Ernst has since won his point in the case of a number of books which
authorities have since attempted to suppress, such as Pay Day, Married
Love, Contraception, Female, A World I Never Made, and Ulysses. He
was also able, in 1936, to get the Federal Court, for all practical purposes,
to sot aside the Comstock Law of 1873 banning the mailing of material
containing birth-control information and devices.

The Watch and Ward Society of Boston attempted to imitate the work
of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. But the Watch
and Ward overshot the mark in attempting to suppress the April, 1926,
issue of The American Mercury. The upstanding editor, H. L. Mencken,
went personally to Boston, fought out the case, and gained a victory in
the court.5* The Watch and Ward Society was further discredited by
its irresponsible use of stool-pigeons in attempting to incriminate book
stores in the Boston area.

As with books, there is no pre-censorship of the theater. The producer
simply has to put on his play and then see what Mr. Sumner, the Watch
and Ward Society, the mayor, or the police think about it. If the latter
regard it as obscene, the play is suppressed. In the suppression of plays,
the censors have gone to an extreme not achieved in censoring books and
pamphlets. They have, in certain places, secured the right to padlock a

68 See Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On, passim.

e^See A. G. Hays, Let Freedom Ring, Boni & Liveright, 1929, pp. 160 ff.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 579

theater, thus denying the author and producer the right of trial by jury.
In certain cities, the commissioner of licenses is able to bulldoze producers
by holding over them the threat of a revocation of the license of the
theater. Religious influences have been also strong in promoting theater
censorship. The humor and inconsistency which prevail in theater cen-
sorship may be seen from the fact that Mayor Edward Kellcy of Chicago
freely permits burlesque and strip-tease to ply their trade in Chicago,
but was inexpressibly shocked by "Tobacco Road," which he promptly
suppressed. On the other hand, "Tobacco Road" ran in New York all
through Fiorello La Guardia's first two terms as mayor, but he clamped
down on "strip-tease," the only bit of art that burlesque has ever provided.
The extreme to which theater censorship has gone at times can be seen
in the refusal to allow such serious plays as Eugene O'Neill's "Desire
Under the Elms" and "Strange Interlude" to be shown in Boston, the
alleged "Athens of America," at the same time that the utmost freedom
was given to wide-open burlesque shows.

There have been extensive efforts to censor art on the ground of ob-
scenity.05 The first much-publicized case was Anthony Comstock's
attack on "September Morn," an extremely chaste and frigid nude, in
1913. His successor, Mr. Sumner, in 1930, attempted to restrain a
gallery which was exhibiting classic pictures by Rembrandt and Goya.
The Post Office has also taken a hand, as, for example, when it revoked
the second-class mailing permit of the serious Studio magazine in 1939
for carrying some classics of art. Nudism has been vigorously attacked.
The Nudist magazine was suppressed and the importation of nudist books
from abroad has been banned in many cases.

The opponents of obscenity censorship advance a number of arguments
against it.50 In the first place, they maintain the value of sophistication.
They hold that it is beneficial to society to have realities and evils made
known early in life. They point to the proud record and notable achieve-
ments of our country before any obscenity statutes had been enacted.
They contend that the censors only advertise and promote the circulation
of the materials they ostensibly seek to suppress. For example, the
Well of Loneliness sold only 5,000 copies in England before it was cen-
sored, but 200,000 copies were disposed of in the United States after it
had been given the publicity associated with the attempt to suppress it
here. Further, it is alleged that, in their effort to protect other people's
morals, the censors forget their own. Critics point to the reprehensible
system of using stool-pigeons and the like. Further, it is contended that
the censors are highly illogical in their attitude towards the law. They
are extremely fond of the law when it agrees with their point of view and
upholds their contentions. When the law opposes them, they are ex-
tremely vicious and vehement in condemning it. They will go to almost
any length to provide subservient judges, but they are extremely critical

55 Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On, chap. VIII.
06 See, especially, Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On, chaps. XV-XVII;
and G. J. Nathan, Autobiography of an Attitude, Knopf, 1925, pp. 252 ff.

580 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

and contemptuous of judges who possess the nerve to be independent.
They even go so far as to denounce such judges in their official reports.
The critics of conventional censorship under the* obscenity concept do
not argue that youth should have no protection against any kind of play
or publication.57 They do not see, however, why adults must be protected
against a knowledge of the facts of life. In their book To the Pure, Ernst
and Seagle have framed what they regard as a civilized and adequate
statute sufficient to protect youth from all legitimate threat of exposure
to obscenity:

Sec. 1. Pornography is any manner of thing exhibiting or visually representing
persons or animals performing the sexual act, whether normal or abnormal.

Sec. 2. It shall be criminal for anyone other than a teacher in the course of
his employment, or a doctor in the regular practice of his profession, or a parent
(of the child in question) to exhibit, sell, rent or offor for exhibition, sale, or rent,
any such pornographic material to any person under the age of eighteen.5™

Our main protection against excesses in obscenity censorship is recourse
to intelligent and independent judges and to reasonable district attor-
neys. The Court of Appeals of New York State has frequently reversed
decisions made by lower court judges, who were intimidated by John S.
Sumner or were sympathetic with him. Most federal judges before
whom obscenity cases have been fought with vigor and courage on the
part of defense attorneys have rendered fair decisions. The work of
astute and courageous attorneys, like Morris Ernst and his associates, has
provided much protection against excesses. Then crusading newspapers
have been extremely helpful. Mary Ware Dennett's case in 1929 was
notably aided by the support given by Roy W. Howard and his New York
Telegram, then a courageous and liberal newspaper.

The Libel Racket. There are other, in many ways more important,
types of censorship outside the range of obscenity prosecutions. Libel
laws are a particularly nasty stumbling block in the way of getting the
truth about commercial commodities.58 Publishers of both books and
newspapers can almost always be threatened with a libel suit if they
criticize, however honestly and fairly, a commercial product. If they are
not thus easily intimidated, an actual libel suit may be started, even if it
is never prosecuted. If the institution of a libel suit does not scare off
criticism, the publisher of the alleged libel must go to considerable ex-
pense to win his case, even if he is sure of his ground. Therefore, there
is a natural inclination to refrain from criticizing commercial products,
whatever the fraud and dangers connected with their consumption. As
a result, it is difficult for the average consumer to get adequate informa-
tion about many, if not most, of the commodities he makes use of in daily

57 Nathan, op. cit.

57« From To the Pure, by Morris L. Ernst and William Soagle, Copyright 1928.
By permission of The Viking Press, Inc., New York.

58 On the incredible extent of liability to prosecution for libel and slander, see
M. L. Ernst and Alexander Lindey, Hold Your Tongue, Morrow, 1932.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 581

life. While a newspaper is thus dissuaded from publishing criticisms
of commercial products, the incentive of large advertising revenue renders
it cordial towards the acceptance of advertising material proclaiming the
virtues of commodities for which the publisher may entertain a personal
and well-founded scepticism.

While speaking of libel, it is worth while to point out that there is an
actual libel racket in existence. Members of the racket scan the daily
papers in search of news items which may be regarded as potentially
libelous or slanderous. Then they seek out the person about whom it
has been written (who usually has not detected any libel or slander) and
urge him to go to court with the case, offering to bear the expense of the
suit and to split the proceeds. Newspapers are very wary about the
eccentricities of juries and are likely to settle quietly out of court when
threat of a suit is made.

Political Censorship. Political censorship is a special menace in our
day. A majority of the American states, during and after the first World
War, passed sedition laws outlawing revolutionary views. More recently,
many of these states have passed laws muzzling teachers through loyalty
oaths, and the like. More important is the general censorship of news
on a national scale which prevents the citizens from obtaining the in-
formation on public affairs which is essential to the success of democracy.

Not since the era of licensing presses in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries has there existed such a degree of censorship as now prevails
throughout the civilized world with respect to the publication of political
facts in newspapers and books. But the most menacing censorship exists
with respect to the suppression of news which prevents the citizens from
obtaining 'the information essential to the operation of democracy. This
overwhelming wave of censorship started with the first World War. The
censorship system was part of the general campaign of propaganda carried
on by the major states involved. It was natural that they would wish to
publish only materials favorable to their side of the conflict and to ex-
clude, so far as possible, any news favorable to the enemy, whether
expressing the enemy's viewpoint on the conflict or recording victories of
the enemy. It was also necessary to keep information from falling into
the hands of the enemy. Not only newspapers and books were censored,
but also the letters sent by soldiers to their relatives and friends.59

The system of censorship, though relaxed somewhat, was continued
after the first World War. Then came the rise of totalitarian states in
Russia, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, and the suppression of democracy
in many states which did not openly espouse either Fascism or Com-
munism. In the totalitarian states there was no pretense of freedom of
the press. The people were told only those things which the government
wished to tell them. Moreover, these states became extremely zealous
in selecting the news which*was sent abroad. They wished to have not

59 See J. R. Mock, Censorship, 1917, Princeton University Press, 1941.

582 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

only their own citizens but the rest of the world read only materials
favorable to their policies. As a consequence, the blight of censorship
descended upon most of Europe.

It is worth while to describe the elaborate machinery for propaganda
and censorship which was set up in Nazi Germany, as an example of the
rigorous control created over thought and culture in totalitarian countries.
The Ministry fur Propaganda and People's Enlightenment is divided into
nine main departments: Administration and Law, Propaganda, Radio,
Press, Film, Theater, Defense, Writing, Music, and the Plastic Arts. The
Ministry has thirty-one regional offices scattered throughout Germany,
and all of the nine departments are represented in each of the thirty-one
regional offices. The Ministry for Propaganda supplies much of the
material which is put out in all these fields, and nothing can be written,
said, or done that is not approved by the Ministry. In this way, complete
censorship is exerted over German thought and culture in the interest of
protecting and strengthening the Nazi ideology. The Minister of Propa-
ganda is Dr. Paul Joseph Gocbbels, who has held his office since it was
established after the Nazis came into power.

Further control over Nazi culture is exerted by the National Chamber
of Culture, which is divided into seven constituent chambers: Music,
Arts, Theater, Literature, Press, Radio and Film. Each of these super-
vises the cultural activities falling within its field throughout all Germany.
Each one is further subdivided. Dr. Goebbels is also president of the
National Chamber of Culture, which is thus linked closely with the
Propaganda Ministry.

In addition to these extensive organizations, two other ministries are
directly related to the regimentation of Nazi mentality. One is the
Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs, which has charge of all religious
matters, and the other is the Ministry for Science, Education, and Na-
tional Culture, which has control over educational activities. It is
obvious that this comprehensive machinery makes possible a meticulous
supervision over all phases of German thought and culture.

Much the same situation with respect to censorship exists in Latin
America and the Orient as in totalitarian countries in Europe. Prior to
the current war with China, Japan was more tolerant of news dis-
patches sent out of the country than were most other non-democratic
states. But today Japan has an airtight censorship over all news.

Even in the United States, a censorship over the material given out to
the newspapers, unparalleled in our history prior to the first World War,
existed unimpaired down to our entry into the second World War. The
situation has been described by Eugene J. Young in his revealing work,
Looking Behind the Censorships:

Even free America has its own censorships. Oftce upon a time, as I knew, it
was possible for a newsman to wander about Washington and talk freely to any
official about his work and his ideas of government. A bureau chief might not
agree with his superior and would say so. One head of a department might take
issue with another. Out of their frankness much discussion — which was often

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 583

good for the country — could be aroused. The public got most of the facts
essential for the formation of clear judgments.

The World War brought about a change. It was necessary to keep our plans
and preparations secret, lest the enemy profit. Censorship rules were drawn
up by the War Department and were accepted by the press. In the various
departments having to do with the war central bureaus were established. Subor-
dinates were told they must send any news to these bureaus and must not talk
to correspondents. There were many leaks but, in general, outgivings were con-
trolled by the high authorities.

After the war this system was found to be highly agreeable to the men in
power. They could manipulate information to suit their own ends and those of
the administration in power. So the central bureaus were continued under
Presidents Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt. In the last of these ad-
ministrations they were turned not only into censorial organs but into high
pressure propaganda agencies. In the depression it was necessary to find work
for many writers, among others of the millions who had been thrown out of jobs,
and hundreds of these were put into the departments at Washington and their
branches. They have busily turned out matter favorable to their bosses and,
under direction, have suppressed facts that might be unfavorable. It has been
virtually impossible, for instance, to get many important details of the expendi-
tures of the billions of dollars of relief money.

With such domestic matters, however, I am not concerned. What is of im-
portance here is the censorship exercised by our State Department. Of that
it can be said there is no more rigid system of silence anywhere in the world.
The press can learn virtually nothing of what is being done in our foreign
relations until the moment arrives when the Department decides to issue its
announcement in its own wording. There have been important occasions when
I thought the American people should know what was going on and I have
learned through London or Paris what the Washington authorities were doing.
But in the matter of Far Eastern negotiations or activities it is impossible to
find out anything until officials choose to speak or events bring their own
revelations.60

The general engulfing of the world by news censorship in the 'thirties is
admirably summarized in the following paragraph by 0. W. Riegel:

In summary, the world is moving rapidly into an era of universal obstruction
of the free flow of information and opinion. In the name of nationalism, the
fetish of the decade, freedom of speech and the press has already been denied to
approximately nine-tenths of the world's population, including the populations
of Russia, China, Japan, Germany, Italy, Austria, most colonial possessions, and
smaller states in the Balkans and South America. Interference with the tradi-
tional function of the press as a purveyor of unbiased information is increasing
in other countries which preserve meaningless guarantees of freedom of speech
and the press in their constitutions and statutes.

Everywhere, the importance of regimenting the public mind for national
progress and defense has been recognized, and the times are witnessing an un-
precedented professionalization of propaganda activities in the form of press
bureaus, press experts, the semidiplomatic status of newspapermen, the emphasis
of economic and social compulsions affecting the journalist, and the organization
of programs to inculcate chauvinistic patriotism.

The League of Nations partakes of the character of a counter propaganda
agency, and its prestige has lately been losing ground. The existence of a non-
political, fact-finding organization for the dissemination of world news is becom-
ing progressively more impossible, and the immediate prospect is a checkerboard

60 Lippincott, 1938, pp. 32-34.

584 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

of nationalistic states whose populations are forced to obey the whims of their
political masters by the deliberate manipulation of public opinion.61

It has been suggested that foreign correspondents might escape from
the censorship by appealing to the representatives of their own govern-
ment in foreign lands. But it has been amply shown that this expedient
is entirely futile. Few ambassadors, ministers, or consuls will jeopardize
their standing in a foreign country by lodging a protest against the pre-
vailing censorship rules. Time and time again, major governments of
the world have sat calmly by while competent correspondents of papers
in their own country have been ousted from foreign states, simply because
they desired to tell some part of the truth with respect to what was going
on therein. The helplessness of the foreign correspondents, in the face of
the censorship which has settled down over the world, has been admirably
described and analyzed by the journalist George Seldes in his important
book, You Can't Print That. It is obvious that all that has been said
here about censorship of the press in Europe and elsewhere applies equally
to the radio. Where news is shut off in the press, it is as fully excluded
from the air.

The success of democracy depends upon the ability of the average
citizen to get hold of the facts about public affairs. Today in the greater
part of the world, the truth cannot be read by the citizen, and what he
does read and hear is rarely the truth. Likewise, the censorship gives
citizens a perverted notion of world affairs, stimulates arrogant patriot-
ism, and increases the danger of war. As Riegel puts the matter:

Modern man's curiosity concerning events outside of his own immediate circle
and community is satisfied by a day-by-day diet of news, and the character of an
average man's views on political questions will be affected by his news diet in
the same way that the condition of his physical body is affected by the kind of
foodstuffs he eats. The analogy is inadequate in this sense, that a man who
mnlnourishes his body on a diet exclusively of whiskey or sugar is injuring chiefly
himself, while a man who lives on an unbalanced diet of news is not only injuring
himself but is a source of danger to everyone with whom he comes into contact.62

The outbreak of the second World War in September, 1939, brought
the censorship of foreign news to completion. But the American press
insisted on news, whether it could be obtained or not. The result was a
vast amount of fiction. Battles were invented on the Western Front from
September, 1939, to May, 1940. Gross exaggerations were published
after extended hostilities actually broke out in April, 1940. Reporters
were not allowed to go to the front in the Russo-Finnish war in the winter
of 1939-40. Hence the most grotesque stories were printed, such as the
one of whole regiments of Russian soldiers frozen in their tracks, still
grasping their rifles. Absurd stories about Nazi Fifth Column activities
in Norway, France, and elsewhere were spread, following the initial
notorious exaggerations of Fifth Column plotting in Norway. The

« 0. W. Riogel, Mobilizing for Chaos, Yale Press, 1934, pp. 167-168.
**Ibid., pp. 10&-109.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 585

Fifth Column stories replaced the atrocity tales of the first World War.
It was alleged that Holland was betrayed by Nazi agents who had been
circumcised and sent into Holland in the guise of Jewish refugees. Num-
erous stories of attempted invasions of Britain by the Nazis were pub-
lished, some stating that the Nazis were burned wholesale when oil
poured on the Channel waters was set afire. Germans were portrayed as
having occupied the Balkans months before they did so. Periodically,
stories were printed representing a definite rift between Stalin and Hitler.
The papers often printed a formal notice that European news was cen-
sored, but they published such highly censored news as though it had
been free, comprehensive, and authentic.6211

As interventionist sentiment and Administration policies brought the
United States closer to war, non-interventionist material was derided
and cold-shouldered by most of the press and the radio broadcasting
stations. It was alleged that the federal government had already drawn
up plans for an elaborate system of wartime censorship.63 Soon after
we entered the War on December 8, 1941, a sweeping system of govern-
ment censorship of the press, radio, and moving-pictures was set up under
the direction of Byron Price of the Associated Press. Special assistants
were provided to supervise the press and radio, and Lowell Mellett was
named coordinator of moving-picture activity. In February,' 1942,
Attorney-General Biddle moved for even more drastic censorship; in the
form of a "National Secrets" bill.

Moving-Picture Censorship. The great importance of moving pictures
in modern communication and entertainment makes the problem of movie
censorship one of much significance for the American public. In a
slashing .criticism of the existing system of censorship, in their book
Censored: The Private Life of the Movie, Morris L. Ernst and Pare
Lorentz, two distinguished and competent students of the movies, de-
nounce movie censorship as perhaps the greatest racket in America today.
They describe the movies as the "hen-pecked" product of a group of
vacuous and idle female busybodies, who lack both intelligence and
vision. On the other hand, we find the Catholic watchdog, Martin
Quigley, in his Decency in Motion Pictures, denouncing the present type
of movie censorship as inadequate and permitting the exhibition of
grossly and diversely immoral films. He represents the point of view of
the Catholic element, which, organized in the Legion of Decency, has
been particularly active in recent years in attempting to bring about more
rigorous censorship of the films. There is much to be said for both of
these points of view, when one considers the group for which each is a
spokesman. Ernst and Lorentz represent the point of view of open-
minded adults, who view the movies as a potential instrument for the
production of a high grade of art and intellectual stimulation. Mr.

62aSoe Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Bulletin, "Russia, Finland, and the
U.SA.," April 30, 1940; and "The Fifth Column," ibid., July 8, 1940.
63 See Walter Davenport, "You Can't Say That," in Collier's, February 15, 1941.

586 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

Quigley has in mind the possibly disastrous effects of movies upon chil-
dren, especially children of average and sub-normal mentality. That
the Catholics are still alert in their effort to censor the movies may be
seen from the attack on Greta Garbo's picture "Two-Faced Woman" by
the Legion of Decency in the autumn and winter of 1941.

The legality of motion picture censorship was established by a Supreme
Court decision in 1915, which ruled that movies fall in the class with
circuses rather than newspapers, and hence are legitimately subject to
public and private censorship.6* The censorship of films has extended
to an almost incredible degree. A decade ago the censors in New York
State deleted or rejected nearly 40 per cent of all feature films submitted
to them, thus throwing out or censoring more than a third of all the
important films. And it should be kept in mind that a very considerable
self-censorship had alreiidy been imposed by the producers in making the
films. The producers have no inclination to waste their money in making
films, however excellent, which they are sure will be rejected.

The extent of this censorship indicates the arbitrary and unpredictable
character of film censorship. After years of experience, the most skillful
producers were only able to guess with an accuracy of approximately 60
per cent what the censors would do to their product. There is no reason
to believe that the State Board of Censorship in New York is any more
narrow-minded than other censors. Indeed, it is probably somewhat
more tolerant than other state and local boards of review.65

Domestic motion-picture censorship in the United States has until
recently been in the hands of three different groups. The first is the
National Board of Review, organized in New York State in 1909.66 It
was originally founded by the Peoples Institute of New York City with
the noblest intentions. It assumed, at one and the same time, to protect
morals and avoid censorship. It proposed to review films and suggest to
producers items that might well be left out. It is supported mainly by
the Daughters of the American Revolution, the International Catholic
Alumnae, the Parent-Teachers Association, and the General Federation of
Women's Clubs. Some of the members functioned directly in connection
with the production of films, making suggestions to the producers and
Will Hays as to what should be left out of the film before it is offered
for exhibition. The Board also passed on completed films and rated the
works of even such immortals as Shakespeare and Dickens as "good,"
"educational," "subversive to morality," and so on. Though without
legal authority, it exerted a powerful influence over motion picture ex-
hibition. In the state of Florida and in the City of Boston, for example,
it was illegal to exhibit a film which did not have the approval of the

64 See Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On, p. 78.

65 The mortality of films at the hands of the New York censors has improved
somewhat in the last ten years. In 1938, it rejected or deleted 135 feature pictures
out of 952.

66 On the National Board of Review, see Ernst and Lorentz, Censored, Cape and
Smith, 1930, Chap. IV. For the organization of the Board, see pp. 106-107.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 587

National Board of Review. It invaded most localities of the United
States through local "better films committees," which are, for the most
part, made up of individuals especially on the alert to protect the con-
ventional moral traditions and practices. The National Board of Review
has recently disbanded.

In Hollywood itself we have the famous organization, the Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors of America, organized in 1922 under
the direction of Will Hays, who is frequently referred to as "the Bishop
of Hollywood." He draws a salary of $100,000 a year. This organiza-
tion was set up by the motion picture producers themselves to provide for
censorship at the source of production and thus head off more drastic
and foolish censorship later on. Faced by the threat of federal censor-
ship and boycott, the Hays organization adopted, in 1930, a Production
Code dictated by Catholic critics of the movies. It was revised in 1934.07
Mr. Hays' organization passes upon all entertainment films produced for
commercial purposes in the United States. On the one hand, it advises
the producers to omit what it regards as objectionable features, when
viewed from the standpoint of the movie clientele, particularly of those
interested in the censorship of films. On the other, it tries to placate the
censors and assure them that it has deeply at heart the responsibility of
seeing to it that only safe and sane movies are released for exhibition.
Considering the difficulties of its position, it has done fairly well in the
way of protecting the public from more vicious and extreme forms of
censorship. Ernst and Lindey give the following sample of the way in
which the Hollywood Code works out in practice:

The administration has been responsible for shelving a number of projected
films, among them Shaw's Saint Joan, James M. Cain's The Postman Always
Rings Twice, and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. During 1937 it re-
viewed no less than 6,663 full-length domestic feature scripts and pictures, and
ordered innumerable cuts and changes. It tabooed scenes showing kisses on the
neck and shoulder, ladies removing or adjusting stockings in the presence of men,
men touching ladies' legs, men and girls lying together on a bed.68

Finally, we have the state boards of censorship in some six states.
While there are some open-minded and intelligent members of these
boards, they are made up, for the most part, of minor politicians and
busybodies. These six state boards do most of the open censoring.
Their work, on the whole, is incompetent, hurried, superficial, and arbi-
trary. In New York State, the Board, which is officially lodged in the
State Education Department, has at times been so busy that it has had to
call in state troopers to help them to review the films. On the whole,
they tend to remove even moderate sex-realism, and, what is more
menacing, to discourage frankness in regard to war, political graft, and
social oppression. These six states which have boards of censors are

67 For details of the Code, see Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On, pp. 1

68 From The Censor Marches On, by Morris L. Ernst and Alexander Lindey, copy-
right, 1939, 1940, reprinted by permission from Doubleday, Doran and Company,
Inc., p. 91.

588 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kansas, Virginia and Ohio. The
fact that six populous key states have state boards of censors affects
motion-picture production for the country as a whole. There might as
well be forty-eight state boards, for producers cannot afford to prepare
separate versions of pictures. They are guided by what the state boards
are likely to accept.68

The most effective exposure of the activities of state boards of censor-
ship was the monograph What Shocked the Censors, published by the
National Council on Freedom from Censorship. It was a complete
record of the cuts in motion-picture films, from January, 1932, to March,
1933, by the New York State censors, who are considered the most en-
lightened of the six boards. The character and essential futility of their
work is thus summarized:

Virtue must always be rewarded; sin and crime always punished — even if only
at the tail-end of lurid reels of vice and violence. Life must not be treated as it
really is, but as bureaucratic moralists think it should be. Moral lessons must
be taught — if not in newspapers and magazines, and on the stage, at least in the
movies. But the producers have learned to get away with almost anything
suggestive or immoral, if it only has the proper moral ending.70

State boards have frequently rejected altogether films which have been
approved by the National Board of Review. A notorious case was that
of the film "High Treason," which was highly recommended by the
National Board of Review. This film had no sex element in it whatever.
It was a peace movie dealing with the problem of war and international
organization. Its general theme was the triumph of international organ-
ization against world war. It was a highly practical and valuable presen-
tation of the cause of peace and world organization. It was charged, in
the case of the rejection of the film by the Pennsylvania State Board, that
the Pennsylvania steel industries had exerted pressure because they were
opposed to anything which promoted the cause of peace and disarmament.
At any rate, it could hardly be alleged that this film was rejected because
it would in any way corrupt the morals of youth. In 1937, considerable
excitement was raised by the rejection of the film "Spain in Flames"
because it was alleged that it presented too favorable a view of the Loyal-
ist government. Other important films which have been banned were
"Narcotics," a portrayal of the drug traffic; "Witchcraft," the story of
superstition through the ages; "Polygamy," an account of polygamous
practices in early Utah and Arizona; and "The Birth of a Baby," a non-
obscene educational film. "Scarface," the best of the gangster films, was
held up for months and it cost over $100,000 to patch it up to suit the
censors. In 1938, another picture of Spain, "Blockade," was extensively
banned by local censors. As a general practice, innumerable and often
incredible cuts are made in most of the significant pictures.

69 For a description of the work of the state boards of censors, see Ernst and
Lorentz, Censored, Chap. II.
™ Op. cit., p. 15.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 589

The moral history of a film may be fairly described as follows: A story
is offered to a producer, and if it is regarded as promising material it is
put in the form of a brief and sent to the studio. If the production heads
are interested in it, a preliminary motion-picture version is prepared and
further investigated as to its availability for production. If it is accepted
the script is completed, being incidentally edited and censored by the
producers in the process. It is then submitted to Will Hays' organization,
which views it from the standpoint of its probable reception by the various
censorship organizations. An elaborate code was drawn up, as we have
seen, for the Hays' organization in 1930, containing extensive stipulations
as to the details of films which will be acceptable. Most producers take
heed of these stipulations, and prepare their scripts in accordance with
the regulations. The Hays' organization takes care of any oversight in
this regard. It may also suggest more drastic changes, in the light of
the current temper of censorship opinion in the country. Of late years
it has had to take serious account of the growing Catholic demand for
drastic censorship of films, and of the drive against social liberalism.
We have already noted that Mr. Hays has also been advised until re-
cently by twelve club women in Hollywood, who represented the National
Board of Review and affiliated organizations. When a script has been
returned to the producers by Mr. Hays' organization, the filming is done,
and the Hays' organization reviews the final product. If so ordered,
further deletions are then made. The film, can then be released for dis-
tribution and exhibition.

Until recently, the film then had to run the gauntlet of the National
Board of Review and the state and local censors. The National Board
has disbanded, but the state and local censors still persist. We have
already described the bannings and mutilations by state censorship
boards imposed on films that have already been elaborately censored by
the producers and the Hays' organization. Local censors, such as the
mayors of cities, ban and cut still further. Despite all this, there is still
a persistent demand from many sources for even more drastic censorship.

The degree to which the censors have intimidated the producers is well
illustrated by the experience of Ernst and Lorentz in gathering the
material for their book on movie censorship. While most producers are
personally indignant over censorship rules, they all refused to impart to
Ernst and Lorentz a single bit of information about their maltreatment
by censors. The large body of information used by Ernst and Lorentz
was obtained from Will Hays' office mainly by strategy and subterfuge.
The producers long refused to reveal the full details of the Producers
Code. They were afraid to make any public protest or to have it known
that they resented their treatment. They feared that to do so would
lead to retaliation in the way of malicious cutting of the films by the
censors. The exhibitors have even less nerve than the producers in
protesting censorship.71

71 See Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On, pp. 75-76.

590 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

The net result of this complex web of censorship is that the best we can
expect from commercial films is passably diverting entertainment. Items
which might suggest thinking about social justice are as rigorously ex-
cluded as immorality. Occasionally, however, a worth-while film, from
the standpoint of its sociological import, may slip by. A notable ex-
ample was "I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang." This film
was due, however, mainly to the particular social interest and adventure-
someness of Warner Brothers, and it was extensively deleted before it was
exhibited. At times, some passages critical of the existing order are
permitted to slip by, as for example in "The Lost Horizon" and "Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town." The March of Time films also occasionally em-
body material that is highly critical by implication. We have already
pointed out how the foreign market for films has exerted a disastrous
influence upon movies shown in this country. The suppression of "It
Can't Happen Here" by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer indicates that down to
1939 no picture was likely to be produced in this country which was
critical of Fascism, even an imaginary Fascist regime in the United States.

By arid large, the elaborate movie censorship does not always eliminate
those items which are morally objectionable, in any sensible interpretation
of this term. Most of the evil effects discerned by the investigators em-
ployed by the Motion Picture Research Council, to which we have al-
ready referred, were produced by movies which had run the gauntlet of
the censors.72 Intellectual and moral banality, rather than moral sound-
ness and the stimulation of personal improvement and social betterment
seem to be the net result of censorship to date. It has wrecked the
prospect that the movies will ever be an intellectual force, promoting
social thought and human betterment, so long as the present system of
censorship persists.

Obscenity, or alleged obscenity, was the basis for most of the early
censorship of the movies, but there has been a steady tendency in the last
decade to shift the emphasis to the suppression of sound social criticism:

Fear of sex is on the wane. The new specter is "subversive" ideas. The
censors are no longer concerned with sex alone; political censorship is the new
goal.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that state regulation of the screen was set
up at the outset specifically to combat indecency. The law is now being per-
verted to uses that were never contemplated.73

A good summary critique of the stupidity and futility of movie censor-
ship has been offered by the Metropolitan Motion Picture Council, a
research organization formerly affiliated with the National Board of Re-
view. It charges that movie censorship is:

1. An aspersion on public morality.

2. An insult to American intelligence.

"See above, pp. 512-514.

™ From The Censor Marches On, by Morris L. Ernst and Alexander Lmdey, copy-
right, 1939, 1940, reprinted by permission from Doubleday, Doran and Company,
lie., p. 108.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 591

3. An excuse for indirect taxation of the industry.

4. An opportunity to dispense political patronage.

5. An obstacle to the production of truly entertaining adult films.

6. A violation of the Bill of Rights.

7. An ideal instrument for the promotion of bigotry and intolerance and a
possible implementing of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.7*

In addition to above-described private and state censorship of films
produced in this country, the federal government exercises a censorship
by deciding what foreign films can be brought into this country. The
customs officials exercise this power of exclusion, as they do in regard to
literature imported into the United States. Some of the best and most
artistic of foreign films have been excluded from the country in this way.75
When we entered the War in December, 1941, federal censorship of
motion pictures was set up. A veteran newspaperman and presidential
aide, Lowell Mellett, was appointed coordinator of motion pictures to
supervise their activities and output.

Radio Censorship. The influence of the radio renders the question of
the freedom of the air of great social significance. This is especially and
emphatically so, since today freedom of the air is vitally related to
freedom of speech. So much larger an audience can be reached by radio
than in any public meeting that if one is denied access to the air he and
his cause are at a fatal disadvantage. In other words, freedom of speech
today is not so much freedom of the soap-box or platform as it is freedom
to use the broadcasting facilities of radio.76

There is no doubt that radio creates new responsibilities and considera-
tions with respect to freedom of speech. In addressing a public meeting,
the speaker is dealing with an audience which has voluntarily come to
hear him. ' The radio speaker, however, may intrude his ideas into a
household that has no inclination to listen. They may be brought before
children as well as adults. To be sure, owners of radios can turn him off
by a twist of the dial, but there is no denying the fact that free speech on
the radio is actually something different from free speech from a soap-box
on a street corner. This fact has been well expressed by Owen D. Young:

Freedom of speech for the man whose voice can be heard a few hundred feet
is one thing. Freedom of speech for the man whose voice can be heard around
the world is another. . . . The preservation of free speech now depends upon
the exercise of a wise discretion by him who undertakes to speak. . . .

No one can take any exception to this as a statement of principle ; but
unfortunately, in practice, "a wise discretion on the air" means a high
degree of sensitivity with respect to the vested economic and religious
interests. The liberal or radical is the person who has to be discreet.

74 Ibid., p. 254.

75 For details of this censorship and the films excluded, see Ernst and Lindey, The
Censor Marches On, pp. 83-84, 97-98, 100-103, 10&-109.

76 For intelligent discussions of radio censorship, see Mitchell Dawson, "Censorship
on the Air," in American Mercury, March, 1934; M. F. Kassner and Lucien Zacharoff,
Radio Is Censored, American Civil Liberties Union, November, 1936; and "New
Horizons in Hadio," The Annals, January, 1941, pp. 37-46, 69-75, 93-96, 102-115..

592 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

It is rare that any limitation is placed upon the grossest excesses of con-
servatism and reaction. Moreover, steps are taken to see to it that few
radicals or noted progressives are ever given a chance to be either discreet
or indiscreet over the air. Scores of illustrious reactionaries give vent to
their conservative views every week over the air. But when President
William 8. Paley of Columbia Broadcasting System decided to give Earl
Browder, a Communist, a chance to speak over the air, it created great
excitement.

Radio censorship, which is extensive and effective, if very smooth and
adroit, is executed in the following ways:77 (1) by refusal to sell time on
the air or to fulfill contracts; (2) by the demand for copies of speeches
in advance, to be censored as the station authorities deem best; (3) by
the threat of drowning out or cutting off the speaker in the midst of a
program when he utters indiscreet remarks or digresses from his manu-
script; and (4) by the relegation of supposedly dangerous speakers to
early morning hours, when all but radio maniacs are in bed. Radio cen-
sorship often extends to unbelievable trivialities. For example, the
Columbia Broadcasting System once denied the air to a famous fisherman
who proposed to recommend fishing for trout with worms, even citing in
his support Calvin Coolidge, who was then President of the United States.
It was feared that this would alienate fly fishermen. One of the major
systems canceled a proposed broadcast by a distinguished scholar on the
Malthusian law of population, fearing that it might offend certain re-
ligious groups. General Johnson was forbidden to the use the word
syphilis in a broadcast.

It has long been the policy of radio to exclude controversial material
from the air. Interpreted in any literal sense, this would exclude almost
any subject one might think of. Fierce controversies are raging over
even the most abstruse aspects of electromechanics and astrophysics.
In practice, the term controversial is limited to religious, social, economic,
and political doctrines. Actually, the test of what is controversial on the
radio runs pretty close to the primitive conception of taboo. Those things
are controversial which are subversive of conservative opinion and institu-
i^ions, namely, any questioning of our religion, sex conventions, patriotism,
or the capitalistic system. Yet there is plenty of talk over the air on
all of these subjects. There are many religious programs from daybreak
to bedtime. One of our great religious organizations gives over much of
its time on the air to denunciation of divorce, birth control, and modern
views of sex. Patriotism is extolled and pacifism is derided by eminent
defenders of the public weal. The virtues of capitalism, general and
particular, are daily pointed out with thoroughness and deep conviction.
Therefore, it seems that "controversy" on the air really means the pro-
gressive views on religion, sex, peace, and the economic order. Clarence

77 For tho Broadcasters' Code, see Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On,
pp. 126, 313-316.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 593

Darrow could not talk against religion, but Dr. S. Parkes Cadman or
any eminent Catholic theologian could freely speak for it. Even Harry
Emerson Fosdick was denied the right to speak on birth control. But
there is no record of any objection to vigorous denunciation of birth
control on the air. Pacifists have had their talks cut short, when they
were able to get on the air at all, but there is no record of turning off a
valiant patrioteer. Communism is frequently assaulted, but no eminent
Communist resident in this country was invited to defend the Russian
experiment before June, 1941.

When he was president of the National Broadcasting Company, M. E.
Aylesworth stated that he would allow representatives of various sides to
controversial questions to have access to NBC programs, but he added
that they must be official and representative speakers. In other words,
William Green and Philip Murray might speak for organized labor, but
not John L. Lewis, Norman Thomas, or A. J. Muste. NBC has an Ad-
visory Council to determine what material and speakers are "representa-
tive." But there are few eminent liberals on the Council. Mr. Ayles-
worth, a shrewd man, advised broadcasting companies to put a liberal or
radical on the air occasionally, so as to preserve the illusion of fairness
and liberality. This may fairly be regarded as the general formula which
is followed, with much caution.

One of the dangers to the freedom of the air has been alleged to be the
monopolistic character of radio broadcasting. That there is a real danger
in this fact cannot very well be denied, but the big companies have be-
haved far better than the smaller local stations with respect to permitting
liberal expressions over the air. The Town Meeting of the Air is de-
livered under NBC auspices. And it was the Columbia Broadcasting
System that first allowed a leading Communist, Earl Browder, to speak
over a major chain. This situation is to be expected, because it is a well-
known fact that big business is far more enlightened than little business.
The logic in the situation with regard to radio is clear enough. The
great broadcasting chains can exclude critical opinion from the air if they
please to do so. But they cannot alter the actual facts in the economic,
social, and political scene in the United States. The facts will ultimately
control the destiny of the country and of radio. We have two alterna-
tives: (1) Full knowledge of the facts, free discussion from different
angles of opinion, constant readjustment, and peaceful settlement of
class struggles; or (2) deceit, censorship, sullen resentment, and, ulti-
mately, resort to force and revolution. The interests of the masters of
the air are clearly with the promotion of the first alternative, which can
only be accomplished by promoting free discussion on the air — and
elsewhere. The American Civil Liberties Union has laid out a program
with respect to the freedom of the air:

1. That all radio stations, in return for the free franchise granted by the
government, be required to set aside desirable time for the presentation of public
issues. No requirement is made as to the forms of programs; merely that the
time be made available without cost for such a purpose.

594 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

2. That whenever a radio station puts on one side of a controversial issue, at
least one other side shall be given an opportunity to be heard on equal terms.

3. That stations but not speakers shall be relieved from responsibility for
libel or slander on programs given on free time. This will encourage stations to
put on controversial topics, and will do away with the necessity of prior censor-
ship of manuscripts.

4. That stations shall keep records of all applications for time refused, as well
as granted, open "to reasonable public inspection," so that station policies may
be checked and censorship recorded.

In addition to the censorship of radio by the broadcasting companies,
the federal government exerts, as we have seen, through the Federal
Communications Commission, wide control over the air. It determines
the number of channels and stations which are allowed, licenses the
stations, and may revoke licenses. It also has gone on record as to its
ideas respecting "meritorious" and "non-meritorious" programs. It has
revoked some licenses, for example, the station of the anti-Catholic
preacher, Rev. Robert P. Shulcr, in California, and that of the goat-gland
therapist, Dr. J. R. Brinkley, in Kansas. It reprimanded and threatened
even the powerful NBC for the skit "Adam and Eve," put on by Charley
McCarthy and Mae West. The FCC threatened station WAAB of
Boston and renewed its license only after the station had agreed to con-
form to governmental opinion and policies.78 A drastic censorship of
radio was provided in December, 1941, after we entered the War, and a
code of "wartime practices" for radio was issued on January 16, 1942.
Not only is there censorship of news over the radio, but interviews and
quiz programs have been sharply curtailed or eliminated altogether. So
has request music and weather announcements.

Remedies for Prejudice, Propaganda, and
Censorship

We may now consider briefly the question of possible remedies for the
growth of prejudice, propaganda, and censorship in our era. This is more
than a mere academic question, since the very future of civilization de-
pends upon the possibility of promoting the cause of tolerance and truth
in our complicated age. If prejudices, ever more effectively inculcated
by propaganda, are to rule the world, the outlook for civilization is dark
indeed.

In totalitarian states, there seems to be no remedy whatever for the
spread of prejudice, the overpowering force of propaganda, and the blight
of censorship. The latter are the very bone and marrow of such states.
Even such a drastic measure as the assassination of a dictator would
accomplish little in countries like Germany and Russia. The systems
of society and government are so well established there that they would
most certainly endure without the presence of Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin.
The system of public education and propaganda existing in these coun-

78 See David Lawrence, "Censorship by the Communications Commission," in
Column Review, February, 1941, pp. 8&-90.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 595

tries increases the prejudices of the population. The rigorous system of
censorship shuts off all possibility of criticism, and the exposure of pre-
vailing prejudices through counter-propaganda is entirely out of the
question. With respect to these totalitarian states we can only await the
trend of world events. The latter may lead to the overthrow of such
states or to the moderating of the propaganda and censorship existing
therein.

In the few important countries of the world, which retain at least some
semblance of democracy, it will still be possible to prevent the triumph of
totalitarianism and censorship if adequate reform measures are adopted
with sufficient expedition. But democracies must understand that they
cannot safely suppress any type of propaganda, even propaganda for
totalitarianism and censorship. The first step toward the suppression
of propaganda in democracy is also the first step toward totalitarianism,
and the censorship which goes with the latter. This fact has been elo-
quently stated by Gerald Johnson in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

When it is proposed to suppress propaganda — that is the moment to erect
a barricade. Propaganda is a word of evil repute. It is a word that is bitter
on the tongues of many honest men. Nevertheless, the right to spread propa-
ganda must be defended to the death by all men who love liberty, for it is a two-
sided word, and what is your propaganda is my free speech.

It may be a sad fact, to many it seems to be an almost intolerable fact, but it is
a fact that we cannot guarantee the freedom of Alfred M. Landon without guar-
anteeing that of Earl Browder, too; and in a country which puts the Communist
candidate in jail for trying to make a political speech, it is always possible that
the Republican, or any other candidate, might some day be jailed for the same
offense.

The moment any candidate, however idiotic, is suppressed, that moment we
make it theoretically possible to gain an apparent consent of the governed by
fraud, and the foundation of our system is no longer safe; but as long as we
defend resolutely the right of every silly ass to spread nonsense, we make doubly
secure our own right to speak words of wisdom, beauty and truth.79

The steps to be followed in a democracy, if we wish to reduce prejudice
and propaganda are perfectly evident. In the words of Clyde R. Miller,
we must keep the channels for the communication of ideas thoroughly
open and accessible to all classes. We must give everyone a chance to
express himself, taking special care to see to it that those who oppose
us have complete freedom of expression.

An important remedial measure is to expose clearly for the benefit of
the public the nature, methods, and devices of propaganda. To expose
propaganda is not difficult. The most subtle propagandists are mere
babes in the woods, when their output is subjected to critical analysis by
trained psychological experts. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis
has laid their methods bare and exposed their devices with crystal clarity.
In such books as those by Messrs. Lumley, Doob, Riegel, Seldes, Rorty,
Jastrow, Albig, and others, the propagandists are held up where the pub-
lic can look them over in a most revealing fashion.

79 "When to Build a Barricade," in Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring, 1938, p. 176.

596 PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP

The great difficulty is to get such illuminating material into the hands
of the public, so that they can be protected against the subtle wiles of
propagandists. This is a problem, indeed, since the propagandists have
a strangle hold on the press, the radio, the movies, and many of the
more important forums. H, G. Wells has said that civilization, today,
is "a race between catastrophe and education." The salvation of public
opinion from complete domination by prejudice and propaganda is very
truly a race between the propagandists and those who seek to expose
them. Unfortunately, the dice are today loaded almost exclusively in
favor of the former. The propagandists are neither profound nor funda-
mentally clever. As Joseph Jastrow has written:

What the persuaders and inspirers say is neither brilliant nor convincing. It
is only that you who fall for it are too easy-going in belief. You figure that
although this system and that scheme may not be all true, still there must be
something in it. But why be content with a scrap of truth salvaged from a
dump? The essential truth is not in any part of it. So far as they are sincere,
the messages are trivial, commonplace, wordy and as suspect as a raised check —
being worth far less than their face value — if, indeed, they are good at all.80

Yet, banality and mendacity, when in command of the avenues of
communication, have far greater power than the widest learning and
the most penetrating intelligence, when the latter are denied facilities for
reaching any considerable public.

Propaganda can be good as well as bad. Analysis is needed to deter-
mine what is good and what is bad. In the United States, the meas-
uring-stick must be the relation of propaganda to democratic principles,
broken down into their specific and salient realities. The honest propa-
gandist, serving democratic purposes, does not object to analysis. Other
propagandists fear and resent analysis. They seek to keep all salutary
analysis of propaganda out of the schools, newspapers, radio, and moving
pictures.

Americans should be especially on their guard against the menace of
censorship, especially in the light of the tragic lessons afforded by the
experience of Europe in the last twenty years. Never has it been more
true that the "price of liberty is eternal vigilance." It was only a little
over ten years ago that Germany was a republic, with a government more
democratic and liberal than that of the United States. It was, in name
at least, a socialist government. Yet, in the course of a few years, it was
transformed into a dictatorship as autocratic and censorial as any abso-
lute monarchy of early modern times. The same kind of transforma-
tion can easily take place in our own country if we do not remain alert
to the symptoms of intolerance, bigotry, and censorship, which are the
harbingers of totalitarianism.81 We have no automatic and spontaneous
safeguards against totalitarianism. Indeed, in some ways we are better
prepared to receive and cherish it than was Germany in 1932.

80 Joseph Jastrow, The Betrayal of Intelligence, Greenberg, Publisher, Inc., 1938,
pp. 13-14.

81 See above, pp. 295 ff.

PREJUDICE, PROPAGANDA AND CENSORSHIP 597

Nobody has more briefly and cogently stated the ease against the in-
tellectual stupidity and social futility of all censorship than has James
Harvey Robinson:

I am opposed to all censorship, partly because we already have Draconian
Jaws, and police willing to interfere on slight pretense in cases in which the public
sense of propriety seems likely to be shocked; partly because, as Milton long
ago pointed out, censors are pretty sure to be fools, for otherwise they would
not consent to act. Then I am a strong believer in the fundamental value of
sophistication. I would have boys and girls learn early about certain so-called
"evils" — and rightly so-called — so that they can begin to reckon with them in
time. I have no confidence in the suppression of every-day facts. We are much
too skittish of honesty. When we declare that this or that will prove demoraliz-
ing, we rarely ask ourselves, demoralizing to whom and how? We have a suffi-
ciently delicate machinery already to prevent the circulation of one of Thorstein
Veblcn's philosophic treatises and Mr/ CabelPs highly esoteric romance. For
further particulars see the late John Milton's "Areopagitica" passim. To judge
by the conduct of some of our college heads the influence of this book is confined
to a recognition of its noble phraseology, with little realization of the perennial
value of the sentiments it contains.82

8- From a letter to the editor, Literary Digest, June 23, 1923.

PART V
Family and Community Disorganization

CHAPTER XV
Marriage and the Family in Contemporary Society

The Historical Development of the Human Family

OUR SIMIAN heritage seems to provide some of the leading traits which
account for the relative permanence of human mating. Man, with other
simians, shares the unique physiological trait of having no distinct mating
season. Among other animals the females are not usually susceptible
to sex stimulation except during the mating season, and the males are
sexually aggressive only when the females are receptive to their atten-
tions during the mating period. The primates and other simians, on the
contrary, are constantly accessible to sex stimulation. This trait natu-
rally facilitated and encouraged permanent sex pairing.

Other simian traits are the tendency to bear fewer young than other
animals and the longer period of helplessness on the part of offspring.
These characteristics are particularly developed in the human race.
Much has been made by anthropologists of the long period of dependence
of the human child upon its mother. John Fiske, for example, attributed
the very origins of organized human society to this fact.

Certain sociologists have tried to find unique qualities in the human
pairing relation. They hold, for example, that man has an innate
antipathy to incest and inbreeding, that there is an inborn feeling of
modesty or shame with respect to sex matters, that the affection existing
between human males and females is not encountered in lower animals,
that chastity is universally insisted upon in the case of unmarried women
and fidelity in the case of married women, and that human beings crave
social approval of their sexual behavior. That many of these traits have
dominated the historical family in most cases is evident, but this fact
must be attributed to cultural factors rather than psychological or
physiological qualities unique in the human race. Modesty, chastity,
aversion to incest, social approval of sex activities, and the like, are
purely cultural in their origin. None of these things can be called
instinctive with man. They have been brought about by social experi-
ence and the growth of folkways.

Though human love is obviously different in degree from the affection
shown in the pairing arrangements of even the higher apes, it can
scarcely be demonstrated to be different in kind. Moreover, much of
the difference in degree in the case of human love is a matter of culture

601

602 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

rather than of biology. The human family, very obviously, rests upon
physiological facts and tendencies which antedate the origins of the
human race. The highly varied forms of sex relations and marriage
among human beings are, however, a distinctly human contribution and
an outgrowth of the cultural and institutional experience of the human
race.

Before the rise of anthropology and historical sociology, it was thought
that the monogamous family, namely, the permanent pairing of one male
and one female, was characteristic of all peoples in all times. This was
a fundamental Christian dogma. Every known form of family other than
the monogamous arrangement was held to be exceptional and the work
of the devil. Indeed, before the Christians, the Jews had denounced the
polygyny (often erroneously known as polygamy) of the Gentile peoples,
even though the man who was traditionally the wisest of all the Jews,
Solomon, was exceptionally successful in bringing together one of the
largest harems of recorded history.

When the science of anthropology, or the study of primitive peoples,
came into being on the heels of Darwin's enunciation of the doctrine of
evolution, the earlier theories of the predominance of monogamy were
very roughly handled.1 According to many anthropologists of the early
evolutionary school, something pretty close to promiscuity prevailed in
the first stages of primitive society, and there was little permanent mating.
The first system of mating was group marriage, out of which polygyny
arose. In the earliest period of polygyny, relationships in the family were
traced through the mothers only. In due time, as a result of wife capture,
wife purchase, and the economic conditions of pastoral life, this maternal
system was transformed into the paternal family, in which relationships
were traced through males, and the predominant power in the family was
assumed by the males. Out of this paternal but polygynous family, mo-
nogamy gradually evolved as the final stage of family life.

Some of the early writers on family origins, such as the 'German-Swiss
philologist J. J. Bachofen, alleged that there had not only been a maternal
family but also a definite period in which women exerted the dominant
authority in political and military life, the age of the so-called Matri-
archate. Even in the twentieth century, reputable writers have revived
something like this earlier notion of the evolution of monogamy from
primitive promiscuity and later maternal rule. Especially notable in this
connection was the voluminous work of Robert Briffault on The Mothers,
published in 1927. His views were less extreme than those of the older
anthropologists, but in a general way he upheld their notion of female
ascendency in primitive society.

The dogmas of the older evolutionary anthropologists with respect to
the gradual evolution of human monogamy out of a primordial promis-
cuity were first attacked in sweeping fashion by a Finnish anthropologist
and sociologist, Edward Westermarck, who published the first edition of

1 See above, pp. 44-45.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 603

his famous History of Human Marriage in 1891. After an extensive sur-
vey of marriage relations among many primitive peoples, Westermarck
contended that monogamy has been the prevalent type of human family
relationship from the earliest days. Other forms of family arrangements
Westermarck believed to be exceptional, even though frequent at certain
times and places. Westermarck tried to support his theory by appeals
to biology. He pointed to fairly permanent pairing relationships among
the higher apes and laid special stress upon the prolongation of human
infancy as a force making for human monogamy. Westermarck's con-
clusions have been generally accepted, with a few qualifications, as the
accurate interpretation of the nature and development of the human
family. They were the more convincing because Westermarck, a tolerant
liberal on sexual matters, had no personal axe to grind in defending mo-
nogamy.

The theory that women once ruled over society — the notion of a so-
called matriarchate — has been rather ruthlessly disposed of by scientific
contemporary anthropologists. They have shown that most of the evi-
dence upon which Bachofen and others relied to support any such con-
tention was either unreliable or misinterpreted, or both. It is well known
that, in primitive society, we have both maternal and paternal families,
that is, families in which relationships are traced exclusively through the
mother or solely through the father. But Franz Boas and his disciples
have raised serious doubt as to whether the maternal family was always
an older type than the paternal family, and they are even more inclined
to doubt that the paternal family arose out of the maternal. It seems
that historic conditions, in time, favored the paternal family. Briffault's
work gave- evidence of immense industry and great learning, but his
efforts to rehabilitate the older notions about human promiscuity and
the predominance of maternal society have been undermined by Bronislaw
Malinowski, Robert H. Lowie, and other present-day anthropologists.
Malinowski's books on The Father in Primitive Psychology (1927) and
The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) are a convincing answer to Briffault's
notions. The attempt of Mathilde and Mathis Vaerting to rehabilitate
the theory of the matriarchate on sentimental and feminist grounds in
their book, The Dominant Sex (1923), is even less convincing than
Briffault's erudite labors.

Anthropologists warn against reading back into primitive times our own
notions with respect to the monogamous family. In historic times the
monogamous family has been the basic social unit, dominating sex habits,
and controlling many other forms of social usage. But in primitive
society it frequently did not exert anysuch clear dominion over social
life^ The monogamous family was often ari'ected by many other social
usages — for example, by the marriage class system among the natives of
Australia and by other complicated relationship systems in primitive
society. Further, the clan and gens system directly modified the status
of the monogamous family among primitives. The clan and gens system
proclaimed a fictitious relationship among all members of a clan or gens,

604 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

even though any direct blood relationship was non-existent in many cases.
Therefore, while monogamy has always dominated the marriage scene,
we must not think of primitive monogamy as being identical in social
status and functions with the monogamy of the rural Christian family
prior to the Industrial Revolution.

There have been other types of family relationships, most notable
among them being polyandry and polygyny. Polyandry means the mar-
riage of one woman to several men, who may or may not be brothers.
In Tibet, where it was usual for several brothers to marry one woman, the
elder brother usually enjoyed certain special privileges and powers. In
other polyandrous situations the husbands might have equal rights to
their common wife. Polyandry has been relatively rare as a form of
human family. The main explanation offered for its existence is that it
best serves the sex needs of man in regions where nature is extremely
unproductive and the resources of the community do not permit universal
monogamy — where one man finds it difficult to support a family. Poly-
andry has also been explained as being due to an excess of males in any
given locality, but this is probably more unusual as a cause than the
barren character of natural resources.

In contrast to polyandry, polygyny, or the marriage of one man to sev-
eral women, has usually been produced by exceptional riches and pros-
perity. In no instance has polygyny prevailed among all the inhabitants
of any given region. It has almost always been restricted to the more
wealthy in the population. It has persisted right down to our own day
in a sub-rosa and non-institutionalized mode of expression, namely in
the frequent tendency of rich males to support, besides an institution-
alized wife and family, one or more mistresses.

A number of clearly evident factors have tended to encourage polygyny.
Sexual ardor, adventuresomeness, the desire for display and prestige,
and the zeal for novelty on the part of man have almost invariably pro-
vided strong psychological motivations for polygyny. Among primitive
peoples, and in early historic societies, the capture of women in war made
it natural for victorious males to appropriate a number of captive women.
Slavery also facilitated polygyny; attractive slave women often became
c6ncubines of their masters, who were already equipped with an institu-
tionalized family.

Political and military considerations have also been operative. Po-
lygyny made it possible for the males of the ruling class to beget many
more children than would have been possible under a monogamous
system. Polygyny was also frequently conferred as a reward for military
valor and strategic prowess. Religion often rationalized and approved
the prevailing practice of polygyny among the ruling class of society,
whom the priests desired to placate and favor, in return for support of
the prevailing cult.

Of all the moral influences which have helped to undermine polygyny
as a fairly open and general practice among wealthy males, the Hebrew
and Christian religions have probably been the most powerful. But

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 605

they have more usually driven it underground into non-institutionalized
manifestations rather than completely extinguished it. Male sexual
ardor has proved too powerful for any type of religion thoroughly to
uproot or completely to discipline.

While the Jewish and Christian religions have supplied the chief
moral sanction for monogamy, and have exerted the main psychological
pressure in its favor, many other factors have tended to make it the pre-
dominant type of family. The extremes of poverty and prosperity which
favor polyandry or polygyny, respectively, have not been characteristic
of human society as a whole. Also, the relative equality of the two sexes
in numbers has inevitably encouraged monogamous forms of pairing.
Moreover, monogamy facilitates devotion to children, since both parents
can give their undivided attention to the offspring of a single woman.
Monogamy also tends to develop sentimental affection. The monoga-
mous family is a more cohesive and restricted form of social unit and sim-
plifies blood relationships. Monogamy also creates far better protection
and much greater solicitude for the wife than can prevail under polygyny.
When, to these many natural advantages of monogamy, was added the
sanction of an authoritative religious system, it is not difficult to under-
stand why monogamy has predominated among the western Christian
civilizations.

In the ancient Near Orient, the monogamous family was prevalent
among the masses, with polygyny relatively common among the richer
males. The position of women in Egypt was a favored one, not matched
in subsequent history until very recent times. Many queens ruled the
country, and, more than that, the property and inheritance rights of
women were fully recognized. Perhaps most important of all was the
fact that property was inherited through the mother:

Egypt had kept very ancient traditions of the eminent right of women to
inheritance . . . the wife, though subordinate in fact, was independent by right.
. . . The wife of a prince gave her sons the right to rule. The wife of royal
race was the keeper of the royal heritage and transmitted the right of kingship
to her children alone.2

It is thought by many Egyptologists that these facts indicate the prev-
alence of the maternal family and matrilineal relationships in prehistoric
Egypt.

Among the Semites of early western Asia, the paternal system domi-
nated and rigorous patriarchal authority frequently evolved. Polygyny
was very common among Oriental Semites other than the Hebrews, and
the latter were unable to stamp it out entirely within their own domains.
One of the chief contributions of the Hebrews to the history of the family
was their sanctification of monogamy and the introduction therein of
strong patriarchal tendencies revealed in the Old Testament. The au-
thoritarian family, which emphasized both monogamy and male dominion

2 Alexandra Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, Knopf, 1921, p. 306.

606 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

and was adopted by the Christian Church in the later Roman Empire,
is primarily a heritage from the Hebrews. But polygyny continued to
prevail in the Orient from ancient times to our own. It was common
among the Persians and also among the Arab sheiks. From these
sources it was taken up by Islam and was practiced by the richer Muslims
from the days of Mohammed himself to our own time. Only in 1926
was it abolished in Turkey, with the introduction of the new social
system by Mustapha Kemal.

Among the Greeks, particularly the Attic Greeks, the family occupied
a rather npeciul position. It was rather thoroughly divorced from the
elements of romance and sentiment, thus showing that the monogamous
family can prevail without any romantic foundation. The Greek family
was a purely practical affair, which existed primarily for the purpose of
breeding and rearing children. The Greek wife was kept in the home
and denied any legitimate sexual freedom outside. There was much
sex freedom for the Greek men, who found their romantic attachments
outside the family with mistresses of a high intellectual order or satisfied
their promiscuous sex cravings through relations with prostitutes. In
Sparta, male adultery was given a quasi-institutional sanction as a
method of producing more male children, who were highly prized as
future members of the Spartan army and military caste.

The Roman family passed through a notable historical evolution.
It started out as a rather extreme manifestation of patriarchal monogamy,
in which the father or eldest living male had almost absolute authority
over his wife and children, even to the extent of inflicting death for
what were considered legitimate reasons. Adultery on the part of the
wife was severely punished and divorce was almost literally unheard of.
Religious, social, and military considerations made the early Roman
family extremely cohesive.

During the later Republic and the early Empire, this type of Roman
family all but disappeared. The free Roman peasantry, which provided
the social and economic foundation for the patriarchal Roman family,
were almost extinguished as a result of wars, the growth of great estates,
and the working of the land by slave gangs. With the growth of wealth,
as a result of conquest and commerce, the richer Romans desired to free
themselves from the older restrictions upon promiscuity. The presence
of many beautiful captives and slave women encouraged their zeal in this
regard. The dispossessed peasants and others who flocked to the cities,
especially Rome, became an urban rabble, herded together in miserable
slums and apartments.

These conditions undermined the old religious and patriarchal family
of early rural Rome among the urban masses. Marriage was no longer
a sanctified social institution, but became a civil contract. There was a
limited development of a sort of feminist movement at this time, giving
the women the right to hold some property and other new privileges
which made for a greater degree of female independence. It was natural
that divorce would become far more common under these conditions. In-

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 607

deed, it became extremely prevalent, particularly among the upper classes,
and not even Augustus was able to check its prevalence. There was a
great deal of vice among the city rabble.

The downfall of the old Roman family was most marked at the end of
the Republic and during the first century of the Empire. During the
latter part of the Roman period, marriage was once more restored, at
least among the masses, to its former sanctity and cohesiveness. The
predominance of Christian ideals during the later Roman Empire has
suggested to scholars that we must qualify the older view that the Roman
Empire disintegrated because of the downfall of the Roman family and
the increase of sexual promiscuity. The Empire actually fell apart
during those centuries when the Christian influence was most effective
in checking the immorality of the Romans. But, no doubt, the condi-
tions which had prevailed before the Christian triumph exerted a power-
ful influence for many generations thereafter.

Under the influence of Paul, Augustine, and other sex purists, marriage
was made a sacrament and brought under ecclesiastical dominion.
Divorce was outlawed, though separation and the annulment of marriage
were sanctioned. Patriarchal parental authority was encouraged by
church doctrine. The chastity of women was extolled, and virginity
became a veritable cult. The fact that medieval life was primarily rural
made it possible for the church to carry through the revolution in morals
and family relationships with relative success. Country life is far more
favorable to authoritarian monogamy than the more complicated con-
ditions of city life. The chivalrous ideals with respect to noblewomen
eased the conscience of feudal lords, who ravished unprotected non-
noblewomen almost at will. By forbidding marriage of the clergy, the
Catholics deprived religious leaders of the benefits of family life, at the
same time ridding them of its responsibilities. While the formal celibacy
of the clergy was taken for granted during the medieval period, it was
not uncommon for priests, monks, and friars to maintain concubines, and
to have children by them. The church frowned on this but was not able
to eliminate the practice until after the reforms which accompanied the
Counter-Reformation.

Protestantism brought with it a number of important changes with
respect to sex practices and ideals. It was as strongly against sexual
sin and promiscuity as were the Catholics, but it believed that the celibacy
of the clergy increased rather than reduced clerical immorality. Inas-
much as the Protestant leaders drew many of their moral ideals from the
Old Testament rather than the New, they tended to stress patriarchal au-
thority in the family. With the Calvinistic emphasis on thrift, it was
natural that the economic value of the housewife would not be overlooked.
And the Calvinistic stress upon the moral virtues of hard work was
emphasized as of particular relevance for the wife. The Protestant ideal
of the good wife was one who was both obedient unto her husband and
passionately devoted to industry and thrift. The Protestants laid con-
siderable stress upon the values of education. Since there were few

608 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

public schools for the masses, the family long had to assume most of the
responsibility for such education as the average child received.

The Protestant theories with regard to the family were brought to
America and received their most complete development on the rural
frontier. The sparsity of population and the isolation of the rural family
in America made the family the center of economic, social, educa-
tional, and recreational life. Dangers from natural and human enemies
encouraged parental authority, discipline, and respect. The economic
value of the family was very great, because there was intense need for
the labor of women and children. Social contacts being relatively few,
the family divided with the rural church the chief place in social, intellec-
tual, and recreational life. And the time spent in the family was far in
excess of that devoted to the worship of God, even in those days when
families frequently spent all day Sunday in adoration of the Deity.
The predominant importance of the family during some two centuries of
American rural life gained for it a preeminent place in our institutional
equipment and our respect. The authoritative rural family became iden-
tified with the absolute ideal in matrimonial arrangements.

The Break-up of the Traditional Patriarchal
Rural Family

The traditional patriarchal monogamy is now undergoing thorough re-
construction in our urban era. The divorce rate has increased steadily
in the last half century ; today there is one divorce for every six marriages
in our country. Family desertions are extremely common, though such
evidence as we possess about their number does not indicate that they are
increasing as rapidly as divorce. As divorce becomes easier, desertion
is less necessary or attractive, for the legal responsibilities of family
life are not obliterated by desertion. We have already pointed out that
there is a much greater prevalence of sexual freedom outside of the family
than was common a half century ago. Many of the functions of the
family are now taken over by other agencies.3 In certain circles of life,
especially in cities, children are no longer an economic asset but a
notable financial liability. Some of the most sacred ideals of the older
family life and sexual morality are today often regarded with much light-
heartedness, especially on the part of the younger generation.

Among the major reasons for the undermining of the traditional
family are the economic developments associated with modern industrial-
ism, and the growth of a secular outlook which challenges the authori-
tarian religious foundations of the conventional family. While the latter
has been most influential in changing our attitudes toward the family,
there is little doubt that economic influences have been more immediately
and comprehensively potent in actually bringing about the downfall of
the old rural family. The latter is no longer the center of economic

See below, pp. 645-648.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 609

life. Many more people buy their food than produce it. Most goods
are now made in factories and purchased from distributors. The work
of women and children becomes progressively less important to the family
in an urban era. Further, legislation limiting the work of women and
children, especially the latter, has made it less possible for these younger
persons to contribute to the income of the family group. Indeed, in urban
life, children are generally a serious liability, so far as family finances
are concerned. Industrialism made possible the remunerative employ-
ment of women and thus gave them an economic independence which they
have never previously known as a class. Hence, millions of them no
longer have to depend upon a husband for their maintenance.

Of all the indirect effects of modern industrialism upon the older family,
it is probable that the rise of city life has been the most demoralizing.
Almost everything used by the city family is produced outside the family
circle. All of the food materials are thus provided, and frequently much
of the cooking is done in commercial bakeries. The declicatessen shop is
slowly but surely crowding out the kitchen in the urban family. In-
deed, many city families eat almost exclusively in restaurants, so that
not only the kitchen, but the dining-room as well has been taken out of
the home. Likewise, amusement and recreation are sought mainly out-
side the family circle. The radio and television have modified this some-
what, but it is likely that novel forms of outside entertainment will also
appear to offset this.

Social work and child welfare activities crowd in upon the former
functions and responsibilities of the family. In Russia, elaborate pro-
visions have been made to enable a nursing mother to work in factories
and leave, her infant under expert care at public expense. In the United
States, day nurseries have been established in many cities where the work-
ing mother can leave her child of pre-kindergarten age. Public schools
and kindergartens have usurped the educational function of the tradi-
tional family. If city life has made children a liability, the growing
popularity, effectiveness, and accessibility of birth control devices have
made it ever easier to dodge the responsibility of child bearing. They
also encourage the seeking of sexual satisfactions without the contracting
of the responsibilities of matrimony. The social radicalism promoted by
modern industrialism has developed a philosophy antagonistic to the
conventional family. Early in the seventeenth century a radical friar,
Campanella, called attention to the fact that the family is the chief
bulwark of the institution of private property. The radicals, therefore,
often sought to break down the sanctity of the family.

Secularism has directly attacked supernatural religion, which pro-
vided the intellectual and moral foundations of the traditional family.
Thoroughgoing secularism denies the existence of any form of supernatural
sanction for any type of social institution, family or other. Probably
the most important influence of secularism upon the modern family is the
divorce of sc;x from sin. For the first time since the days of Augustine,
the notion of the sinfulness of sex has been candidly and sharply assailed.

610 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

The divorce of sex from supernaturalism made this attitude inevitable.
It is held that no form of sex activity can be regarded as an affront to
the gods or likely to place human souls in jeopardy. The family and
other sex practices are judged by their contributions to human welfare,
here and now. Secularism is not necessarily hostile to the family as a
means of satisfactorily handling the problems of sex and reproduction.
Indeed, it recommends monogamy as the normal and most satisfying
method. But it is certainly comprehensively hostile to the tyranny of
indissoluble monogamy. The growth of secularism has removed the
repugnance from the employment of birth control devices, for it wipes
away any such notion as the traditional religious view that birth control
is also "soul control" and prevents immortal souls from coming into
existence. Secularism also sanctions sex satisfaction outside the family
when individual and social well-being may be promoted thereby. It is
quite possible that the growth of secularism may ultimately lead to a
family system more in accord with scientific facts and social realities
than the old-time monogamy. If so, it will increase the success and sta-
bility of family life. But certainly, the secular outlook has thus far
exerted a corrosive and disintegrating influence upon the traditional
family and its moral bulwarks.

An able student of contemporary family problems, William F. Ogburn,
has suggested that the best way of discovering the degree to which the
old rural family has declined is to investigate what has happened, of late,
to the traditional functions of the authoritarian family.4 He lists
seven of these functions: (1) affectional; (2) economic; (3) educational;
(4) protective; (5) recreational; (6) family status; and (7) religious.

The affectional function has been less hard hit than the older family
functions and is probably the most powerful function today. But its
weakness is shown by the fact that about one family in six ends in
divorce, that there are many more family desertions, and that innumer-
able unhappy families persist without resorting to divorce.

That the economic function of the family is being undermined by
modern technology and urban life may be seen from relevant statistics.
Tfre output of bakeries increased four times as much between 1914 and
1925 as did the general population. During the same period, the products
of canning factories and other food factories increased over six times
as much as the population. From 1900 to 1920, the number of restau-
rant-keepers and waiters increased about four times as much as the
population. The number of delicatessen stores increased about three
times as rapidly as the population. The amount of work done in laun-
dries increased nearly four times as rapidly as the population from 1914
to 1925. The sales of sewing-machines for home use have also markedly
declined since 1914. So have the number of domestic servants employed
in the home, in spite of the great increase in wealth between 1914 and

4 W. F. Ogburn, "Decline of the American Family," The New York Times Maga-
zine, February 17, 1929,

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 611

1929. The number of married women per capita in the population that
are gainfully employed has more than doubled since 1900. Indeed, about
one out of every four women employed outside the home is a married
woman.

Education has become almost entirely a function of the schools. The
number of teachers has increased more than twice as rapidly as has the
number of parents since 1870. Children are being taken into the schools
at an earlier age and for longer periods — the school year increased from
78 days in 1870 to 136 days in 1926. The protective function of the
family is also being appropriated by the state. The number of police-
men and other official protective functionaries has increased by over 75
per cent since 1910 — about four times as rapidly as the population.
Juvenile courts and social legislation affecting children are other exten-
sions of the protective function beyond the sphere of the family. In a
later chapter, dealing with recreation, we shall show how fully the
recreational function has passed beyond the family. Bridge-playing and
listening to the radio are about the only forms of recreation which
remain primarily centered in the home.

Family status is changing. Fewer persons live in separate houses;
more live in city apartments, which cramp the living habits of the former
rural family. Children are no longer the aid and protection they once
were. They tend to disperse, and the parents rely more and more on
insurance and annuities to protect them in old age. The state has also
stepped in with old age insurance.

As secularism undermined the religious functions of the family, re-
ligious exercises in the home became less frequent. Automobiles, movies,
and other 'secular diversions help this secularizing trend. All in all, we
may agree with Professor Ogburn's general conclusion:

There is no doubt that the family, as a social institution, is declining. This
is the conclusion from a series of quantitative studies. Many of us do not
realize that the family is declining or even changing. For we are accustomed
to think of the family as we do of the Rock of Ages, something that in the
nature of things must always remain essentially unchanged as the foundation
of society, otherwise civilization itself would not exist. And then when the
day-by-day changes are slight we do not notice them. It is when we return
after a long absence that we can see the cumulative changes that have occurred,
better than those who have not been away.5

The problem of marriage and a home in a changing civilization is,
naturally, receiving more than usually serious attention from others than
alarmed traditionalists and purists. Enlightened persons recognize the
transition through which home and family life is passing and admit that
this is not unrelated to the increase of divorce, desertion, juvenile crime,
juvenile drunkenness, and other evidences of social demoralization. The
home is invaded and challenged by new distractions and amusements.
Marriage itself has become strikingly unstable. According to United

6 Ogburn, loc. cit.

612 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

States government statistics, the average family lasts for only six years
and eight months.

Social historians recognize the broad economic and institutional changes
which have helped bring about the instability of marriage and the revo-
lution of the home. The growth of modern industrialism, the rise of the
factory system, the entry of women into industry, the progress of univer-
sal education, the appearance of the single standard for the sexes, the
impact of the automobile upon the social life and habits, and the like,
have, as we noted above, all played their part. But along with these go
the personal attitudes of those who approach the altar seeking holy wed-
lock. Some light will certainly be thrown on the complex problems of
modern marriage by a study of the state of mind and expectations of
those upon the eve of marriage. The Marital Relations Institute of New
York submitted over 40,000 questionnaires to couples applying for mar-
riage licenses in major cities of the United States, extending all the way
from New York to Sun Francisco, The most important questions asked
were :

1. Why arc you marrying?

2. What do you expect out of marriage ?

3. How long do you think your marriage will last?

4. Do you expect to raise a family?

5. Do you expect to help support your home? (Asked of women only.)

Five thousand men and 13,000 women answered the questionnaire.
The lack of consideration of the purpose and justification of marriages
was brought out by the answer to question 1. Only 1,620, or 9 per cent
of those who replied to the questionnaire, even attempted to answer this
question. Apparently over nine tenths of the couples could offer no logi-
cal explanation. About half of the small fraction that did answer
claimed that they were doing so for love. About a fourth of those who
answered the question said frankly they were marrying for security. An
amusing incident of this justification lay in the fact that about a third
of those who claimed that they were marrying for financial security were
men.

, Less than one per cent of those who answered declared that they were
marrying for the purpose of bearing children. This means that less than
one tenth of one per cent of those who answered the questionnaire as a
whole were marrying for the clear purpose of rearing progeny.

As to what the couples expected out of marriage, "financial security"
and "a good home" ran neck-and-neck for first place among answers to
question 2. These far out-distanced romance and the like. Four women
candidly and sardonically declared that they expected "nothing."

As to how long the expectant couples believed that their marriages
would last, the estimates ranged from "forever" to two years. The aver-
age of all answers submitted to this question produced a composite figure
of a little over 16 years, indicating nearly a 300 per cent optimism when
compared with government figures as to the duration of the average mar-
riage in this country today.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 613

Though only a small fraction gave the bearing of children as their
primary purpose, a larger per cent answered that they expected to raise
a family. The men seemed far more interested in propagation than
the women: some 82 per cent of the men and only 21 per cent of the
women intended to raise a family.

The inroads on the theory that woman's place is in the home were
revealed by the fact that some 43 per cent of the women who answered
question 5 expected to help support their homes by work outside.

Thus leading reasons for the instability of marriage seem to be the
absence of intelligent or rational consideration of the object of matrimony,
and the incidental place of children in the marriage urge. The chief
stabilizing influence would appear to be the zeal for economic security,
but this is mitigated by the fact that so many women express their inten-
tion to contribute toward the support of the home. Such women are
highly unlikely to submit for long to an unpleasant or oppressive home
environment.

Feminism and the Changing Status of the Sexes

A social result of the Industrial Revolution has been the growing inde-
pendence of women and the changing status of the sexes. In primitive
society, women often took a prominent part in social relationships and
industrial operations, even though there were few, if any, examples of the
matriarchate that anthropologists once believed to exist. But, from the
so-called dawn of history down to the Industrial Revolution, civilization
was male-dominated, if not literally "man-made." The Industrial Revo-
lution slowly but siirely upset this state of affairs.

The underlying cause of the revolution in the status of the sexes was
not any rational or altruistic conception of the equality of women on the
part of the men. The whole issue turned on the fact that the new
mechanical methods of production opened the way for widespread em-
ployment of women, who were quite able to watch and tend the new
machinery. We have already noted in Chapter IV the deplorable con-
ditions under which women first worked in the new factories of England.

The entry of women into industry progressed steadily in each country
after the Industrial Revolution reached it. In Germany, the number of
women workers increased from 5,500,000 in 1882 to 11,400,000 in 1925;
in France, from 6,400,000 in 1896 to 8,600,000 in 1921; in England from
3,800,000 in 1881 to 5,700,000 in 1921. A century before 1881, few women
were employed in the English factories.

Some statistics will indicate the growing employment of women in the
United States since 1870. In that year some 13.1 per cent of all women
over ten years of age were gainfully employed. In 1880 the percentage
had increased to 14.7; in 1890 to 17.4; in 1900 to 18.8; and in 1910 to
23.4. By 1920 the figure had dropped slightly, to 21.1; and there was a
rise in 1930, to 22.0. The apparent decline in 1920 was not actual, but
the result of a difference in computation. In 1920, there were some

614 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

8,549,511 women wage-earners in this country; and in 1930 the census
listed some 10,752,116 women and girls as gainfully employed. The per-
centage of married women employed outside the home has also increased
—from 5.6 per cent in 1890, to 11.7 in 1930. The table on page 615 de-
scribes in greater detail the remarkable entry of American women into
industry since 1870.

The industrial status of women also improved. In 1870, 60.7 per cent
of all women gainfully employed outside of agriculture were servants of
one kind or another. In 1920, only 18.2 per cent were listed as servants.
The occupational distribution of the 10,752,000 American women gain-
fully employed in 1930 was as follows: Domestic and personal service,
29.6 per cent; clerical, 18.5 per cent; manufacturing and mechanical,
17.5; professional, 14.2 per cent; trade, 9 per cent; agriculture, 8.5 per
cent; and transportation, 2.6 per cent. The greatest increase has been
in business and the professions. Higher education of women has helped
here. Half of the graduates of the better colleges for women are gainfully
employed.

The wages and salaries paid to women still remain, however, relatively
low. The average weekly wage of all women employed in American
manufacturing industries was approximately $12 in the half-year from
July to December, 1933, the first half-year of "New Deal" wage scales.
Even before the depression, the California minimum wage of $16 a week
for experienced women workers was regarded as high. In representative
American industries the earnings of women have been from 20 to 70
per cent below men's earnings, having averaged about 41 per cent. By
and large, the mass of American women workers cannot maintain decent
living standards on the wages they receive. Government figures show
that the average income of working wives in families with an annual
income of $1,000 or under is $205. Of the nearly 700,000 women working
in New York as wage-earners and in the professions, only 7 per cent
earned over $60 a week even in boom times. A careful study of the
income of women in business and the professions in the mid-1930's in-
dicated that the median yearly salary was $1,548; that 88 per cent earned
less than $2,500 yearly; that only 6 per cent earned over $3,000; and
that only 1.3 per cent earned over $5,000.

There are three main reasons for the lower salaries and wages of
women: (1) Their physical strength does not permit them to carry on
some of the heavy mechanical trades for which men receive relatively
high wages. (2) There is a lack of labor organization among most
women workers, so that they lose the advantages of collective bargaining.
(3) Many women hope to marry and will accept low pay rather than
fight for better conditions, because they believe that their industrial
situation is a temporary one. Nevertheless, the condition of the working
woman today is better than it was a half century ago. Women held
their jobs during the depression better than men did, largely because
unemployment was less severe in the clothing industries than in the heavy
industries where men predominated. Another reason was the lower wages

615

616 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

of women at the outset of the depression.7 The Wages and Hours Act of
1938 was of some assistance to women in insuring them better minimum
incomes.

The relatively unfortunate position of women industrially was one of
the main reasons for their demand for political equality. By getting the
vote, they hoped to pass laws that would elevate their status and do away
with their disabilities. In spite of the growth of democracy since 1825,
only New Zealand enacted woman suffrage before 1900, taking this step
in 1893. Australia followed suit in 1902, as did Finland in 1906, Norway
in 1913, Denmark in 1915, and Sweden in 1921. The devotion and sacri-
fices of women in the first World War hastened the granting of the
suffrage elsewhere. England conceded limited suffrage rights in 1918
and completed the process in 1928 by giving the vote to all women
over twenty-one years of age. The United States extended the right of
suffrage to women through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Most
of the new constitutions of postwar Europe embodied woman suffrage.
Russia established it in 1917, and Germany in 1918.

The political equality of women received a setback with the growth of
dictatorship in Europe. The patriarchal male attitude reasserted itself,
and the tendency was to declare once again that woman's place is in the
home, raising many children to make good soldiers.

Besides having the right to vote, women have taken important public
offices. We have had women Congressmen and governors — even a woman
Senator. Frances Perkins became a cabinet member in March, 1933.

Women have quite generally been admitted to jury service. Many of
them are now practicing law. Florence Allen was appointed to the
United States Circuit Court of Appeals — the second highest court in the
land — by President Roosevelt in 1934.

Their attainment of political equality has spurred women on to secure
legal and economic equality. In the United States, for example, in spite
of woman suffrage, men are in a favored position, so far as legal and
property rights are concerned. In most states the husband has special
rights in his claims on his wife's property and services. He can legally
absolutely control her services in the home and to a considerable extent
elsewhere. He is the "natural guardian" of their children and has
special powers over them. These privileges are offset to some extent
by the fact that the husband still pays alimony in case of divorce. In
recent years in France, according to Andre Maurois:

A married woman . . . cannot have a bank account without getting authoriza-
tion from her husband. Though she may manage a large business while her
husband does nothing, she can make no important agreement without obtaining
his signature. If she is a wage-earner, her husband has a claim on her pay.
If she desires a passport for foreign travel, she must have her husband's consent.8

The State of Wisconsin set a precedent by passing an Equal Rights law
in 1921, which declared that women should "have the same rights and

7 See S. A. Stouffer and P. F. Lazarsfeld, Research Memorandum on the Family in
the Depression, Social Science Research Council, 1937.
* The New York Times, April 8, 1934, Sec. VI, p. 5.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 617

privileges under the law as men in the exercise of suffrage, freedom of
contract, choice of residence for voting purposes, jury service, holding
office, holding and conveying property, care and custody of children, and
in all other respects." This act has not been widely imitated as yet,
though the Russian, Spanish, and Mexican revolutions conferred full
equality on women. There can be no true equality between the sexes,
however, until the law takes cognizance of the special burden imposed
upon women in being the childbearing sex and offers appropriate pro-
tection to motherhood. In Russia alone has the law done so fully, and
this is one of the reasons why the position of woman has been higher in
Soviet Russia than in any other important country.

The first great feminist was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who
defended women's rights at the very close of the eighteenth century. A
century later, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia led the
struggle in England for equal suffrage. In the United States, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), Belva Lock-
wood (1830-1917), Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), Carrie Chapman
Catt (1859- ), and others have taken the lead in working for woman
suffrage and other phases of the recognition of women. The most thor-
oughgoing advocate of the rights of women has been a Russian crusader,
Alexandra Kollontay, who argued for economic and legal equality and
also for full sexual equality. She has lived to see many of her ideals put
into practice in Russia since 1917. In Sweden, Ellen Key (1849-1926)
valiantly upheld women's rights and was especially noted for her courage
in discussing sex problems. The birth-control movement, a great boon
to women, has been valiantly supported by Marie Stopes in England and
Margaret Sanger in the United States.

The rise of feminism has involved a movement for greater freedom of
women in sexual relations. Since human culture and society have been
mainly male-dominated down to the era of modern industrialism and
secularism, it was natural that men should assume a great deal of sex
freedom which they denied to women. Further, men required some means
of insuring themselves against conferring their property upon another
man's son. There thus grew up the "double standard" of sexual morality.
There was one standard of relatively free sex action for men and another
standard for women. The latter carried with it definite restrictions.

The more aggressive feminists have attacked with some vigor this
double standard in both idea and practice. They asserted that woman
should have exactly the same freedom as that which man claims for him-
self. They maintained that a single standard of morality should prevail
for both sexes. Instead of demanding that man limit his sex activities,
in harmony with the restricted field which he left open to woman in this
matter, the feminist exponents of the single standard more usually in-
sisted that women enjoy the wider freedom that has hitherto been a male
prerogative.

The position of such feminists is more valid on moral grounds than
when based on psychological and sociological considerations. No fair
person will deny that woman should have just as much freedom in these

618 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

matters as men. But the biological and psychological differences be-
tween men and women are such as to preclude the practicality of exactly
the same conduct for both sexes, even in the freest kind of society. The
danger of pregnancy in free sexual relations is a risk which women alone
have to run. Women have to bear children, a function denied to the
male, whatever his psychological inclinations. This produces the family
complex on the part of woman, which does not exist in so strong a form
in the male. The fiex complex of women is much more complicated, com-
prehensive, and diffused than male sexual attitudes. Only a pathological
female could have exactly the same form of sexual motivation and aspira-
tions as the normal male. Further, there seems to be some ground for
the assertion that the physiological basis of man's sexual attitudes makes
him more inclined to what is conventionally known as promiscuity.
These are practical facts which cannot be set aside by any emotional zeal
for freedom and equality. Women should be free to do as they wish in
such matters, but for them to hope to duplicate precisely male sex atti-
tudes and behavior would be as great folly as for males to decide that they
will usurp the child-bearing function.

An important social effect of the emancipation of woman has been
the inroads that feminine independence and economic initiative have
made upon the patriarchal home. The latter dominated human society
for centuries when life was primarily agricultural or pastoral in its eco-
nomic foundations and when women were absolutely dependent for their
support upon men. Today, many women prefer the economic inde-
pendence offered by industry and professions to marriage purchased at
the price of economic dependence upon a man. Moreover, if a woman
does not find her husband congenial, starvation no longer faces her if she
leaves him and tries to earn her own living. Many young women have
to support relatives and continue working to an age when marriage be-
comes relatively difficult to contract. Further, when a woman can exist
by her own labors, she is likely to be more discriminating in the choice of
a husband and may never find one to her liking.

In these and other ways, the Industrial Revolution and the entry of
^omen into industry, trade, and the professions have led to ajiigher
divorce rate, more family desertions, and to a diminished importance
of the family as the elemental unit of society. It is logical that in
Russia, where the industrialization and the emancipation of women have
progressed further than anywhere else in the world, we find the old type
of family life much less prominent than in agrarian or bourgeois coun-
tries. It is possible that Plato's idea that the state should exert primary
control and supervision over children will ultimately gain greater head-
way.

A Brief History of Divorce Legislation
and Practices

Divorce seems to have an antiquity as great as that of the family itself.
The pairing arrangements of higher apes and of the earliest primitive

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 619

peoples were often broken up. In well-developed primitive society,
divorce was common ; but it was not usual to sanction it, except for some
reasonable cause. Wives were divorced for barrenness, adultery, general
laziness and shiftlessness, poor cooking, neglect of children, disagreeable
personality, invalidism, and old age. Women were permitted to divorce
their husbands for laziness, neglect, and cruelty. The economic value
of wife and husband to each other in primitive society helped to limit
the frequency of divorce. The woman needed a hunter and protector,
while the man required somebody to do housework, agricultural labor,
and other forms of manual occupation. These economic factors were
stronger than either religion or romance in preserving family life in
primitive times.

The high position of women in Egypt limited the freedom of the male
in divorcing his wife, a practice which was fairly general in the rest of
Oriental society where the patriarchal system prevailed. Among the
Babylonians and Assyrians, the patriarchal system gave the male relative
freedom to divorce his wife, but even here divorce for trivial causes was
frowned upon. But adultery was universally recognized as an almost
compulsory cause for divorce because of its menace to the efficacy of
ancestor worship. An unrecognized bastard male heir would nullify the
whole scheme of ancestor worship in any given family. The Jewish law,
mainly drawn up in the patriarchal period, also gave the man great lee-
way in repudiating his wife and terminating the family arrangement.
The Mosaic law declared that for good purpose a man could write his
wife "a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand and send her out of
his house." Divorce was also permitted by the mutual consent of both
parties, and the wife could divorce her husband for persistent cruelty,
notorious immorality, and neglect. Mohammedan law and tradition
generally favored the easy repudiation of a wife by her husband, though
in certain Muslim areas divorce has been relatively rare. The wife could
divorce her husband, but under greater restrictions and only for rather
extreme cruelty or neglect. The Koran did, however, permit a wife to
obtain a divorce with relative ease if she could obtain consent of her
husband. When the divorce was a judicial proceeding, it was not granted
until three months after the application.

In Attic Greece, divorce was relatively easy. Either the husband or
the wife might have a bill of divorce drawn up and presented to an
archon, who submitted the question to a jury. The sexual freedom
allowed to the Greek husband, the economic value of his wife, and the
domestic servility and dependence of the Greek wife, all seemed to have
worked to minimize the actual frequency of divorce. In Sparta, divorce
was restricted, because children were looked upon as the property of the
state, and adultery was tacitly encouraged in order to increase the num-
ber of children. In early Rome, the patriarchal father could throw his
wife out of his home at will, as a manifestation of his extensive authority.
Formal divorce was permitted for infanticide, adultery, and sterility.
The religious and economic conditions of the early Roman family, how-
ever, made divorce relatively infrequent. The law of the Twelve

620 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

Tables increased the freedom of Roman divorce. In the later Republic
and the Empire, marriage came to be looked upon as primarily a civil
contract. It could be terminated by mutual consent, as essentially a
private agreement Both men and women could dissolve marriage by
the legal formality of a notification of intention to do so. Augustus tried
to check the frequency of Roman divorce by imposing certain economic
and social penalties, but divorce remained common throughout the Em-
pire, and the legislation of Theodosius and Valentinian, in the middle
of the fifth century contained no drastic restrictions. Men were given 15
grounds for divorce and women 12. On the whole, therefore, one may
gay that relative case of divorce was provided for throughout classi-
cal civilization, though in practice the Romans availed themselves of
the opportunity far more frequently than the Greeks. Greek notions
of the family and the use of mistresses and prostitutes without any
notable social stigma seemed to have worked in the interests of family
stability.

Christianity, by making marriage a sacrament, exerted a powerful
influence in the way of restricting the freedom of divorce. But, as we
have just noted above, it was not able to influence Roman law in this
regard for some centuries, the legislation of the middle of the fifth
century A.D. being the most favorable of all to easy divorce. But, under
Justinian in the sixth century, Christian theories prevailed in Roman law.
The old practice of divorce by mutual consent was done away with and
divorce was permitted only for certain specified and actually serious
offenses, delinquencies, or deficiencies. For example, a husband was
allowed to divorce his wife only for her failure to reveal plots against the
state, plots against her husband's life, adultery, chronic social dissipation
in the company of other men, running away from home, defying her
husband by attendance at the circus or theater, and procuring abortion
against her husband's will. In the canon law of the Roman Church, no
true divorce was allowed. Only separation was permitted. Even this
could be secured only through recourse to an ecclesiastical court. Then
it was permitted only for adultery, perversion, impotence, cruelty, en-
trance into a religious order, and marriage within a tabooed degree of
relationship.

The Roman Catholic substitute for divorce was what is known as
annulment. This could be permitted on the ground that there had been
some form of deception in regard to premarital sin, impotence, or other
impediments to complete family life which had not been known to one or
both of the parties prior to marriage. Therefore, the marriage had never
actually been consummated and was null and void from the beginning. It
may be observed that the theory of annulment was often broadly ration-
alized and rendered extremely flexible. In practice, it frequently
amounted to easy divorce, especially among the nobility, who could make
it financially worth while for the Church to take a lenient attitude. But
in theory, at least, the Roman Catholic Church has never sanctioned
absolute divorce, though it has always reserved to itself the legal right

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 621

to grant one. The number of annulments is not large today. There are
estimated to be about 5,000 annually in the United States.

Through under Protestantism the attitude towards divorce was relaxed,
freedom of divorce made only very gradual headway in Protestant coun-
tries. For example, though the Church of England was actually born
out of the divorce case of Henry VIII, it has maintained a very stern
attitude toward divorce right down through the reign of Edward VIII.
The Protestant clergy were, however, highly favorable to increased po-
litical authority and the sovereignty of the state. Divorce tended to
become a matter of civil rather than ecclesiastical law, though religious
dogmas long retained a predominant influence over the content of civil
legislation on family and divorce problems. In Germanic countries
divorce was permitted for adultery, perversion, bigamy, murderous as-
sault, desertion, and extreme cruelty, as well as for insanity and certain
other more unusual causes. Under the Nazis there have been, paradoxi-
cally, both a tightening and a relaxation of divorce legislation, in con-
formity with the racial and eugenic program of the new regime. Marriage
between robust "Aryans" is made rigid, and divorce is possible only for
serious cause. On the other hand, mixed marriages (e.g., of an "Aryan"
and a Jew) and marriages of persons with an inheritable disease are
readily annulled. France long opposed any relaxing of divorce laws, but
in 1884 legislation was passed which permitted divorce for adultery,
cruelty, disgrace, assault, and conviction for an infamous crime. Italy,
strongly Catholic, had relatively strict divorce laws; Fascism strengthened
them in the interest of a higher birth rate.

In Great Britain, down to 1857, absolute divorce could be secured only
through an act of Parliament. In that year, legislation was passed to
enable a husband to divorce his wife for adultery and the wife to divorce
her husband for adultery, or adultery combined with bigamy, rape, per-
version, or extreme cruelty. A Royal Commission recommended liberal-
ization of divorce legislation in 1912. This was achieved by legislation in
1914, 1920, 1923, 1926, and 1930. The legislation of 1923 placed the
sexes on terms of equality, and legislation of 1926 severely restricted
newspaper publicity in regard to divorce cases. But the causes for di-
vorce were not notably extended, with the result that there has been
frequent fakery, perjury, and collusion in trumping up adultery evidence
to secure divorce.

In the United States, divorce was discouraged by the religious influence
in Colonial times, but the practices have relaxed since the Revolution.
Divorce legislation differs among the states. There is no legal ground for
divorce in South Carolina, but there are 14 recognized grounds for divorce
in New Hampshire. In many states, including New York, the only
usual legal ground for divorce is adultery. This has produced a vast
amount of hypocrisy, subterfuge, perjury, and collusion, in some cases
amounting to a veritable divorce racket which is morally more repre-
hensible than the free-and-open system which prevails in Nevada, where
divorce can be procured on the flexible ground of extreme cruelty.

622

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

The best-known liberal and civilized divorce legislation is in the laws
and practices of the Scandinavian countries, of American states like
Nevada, Idaho, and Arkansas, of Mexico, and of Soviet Russia. In 1915
Sweden enacted a law based upon extended study of the whole divorce
problem. It provided for divorce by mutual consent in all cases where
persistent family discord exists. The parties must make an application,
which must be followed by a year's separation accompanied by efforts at
reconciliation under court authority. If the application is renewed after
the passage of a year, the divorce is granted. Other special grounds are
provided for immediate granting of divorce, without the lapse of the year
specified in discord cases. The example of Sweden was followed in 1918
by Norway and in 1920 by Denmark. The radical government in Mexico
eased up divorce legislation, and Soviet Russia provided for divorce by
mutual consent or by the request of either party, without the necessity of
specifying the grounds.9 This relaxing Russian legislation was not
followed by any overwhelming epidemic of divorces, though the rate rose
somewhat. The divorce rate in the Scandinavian countries, in Mexico,
and in Soviet Russia is far lower than that which has prevailed in the
United States since the first World War. The divorce legislation of the
Scandinavian countries, Mexico, and Soviet Russia is epoch-making in
that it is the first legislation of the sort in human history which has been
separated from religious considerations and has been based upon scientific
facts and social investigation.

The Extent and Prevalence of Divorce in
Contemporary America

The outstanding fact about divorce is its steady increase in most civi-
lized countries during the last generation. Japan is an exception; she
once had easy divorce laws but later made it difficult. The following
table shows the tendencies since 1890: 10

DIVORCES PER 100,000 POPULATION

•

1890

1900

1910

1920

1935

United States ....
Japan

53
269
17
13
8
1

73
143
25
15
10
2

92
113
37
24
16
3

139
94
71
63
29
17

171
70
50
74
63
41

France

Germany

Sweden

England and Wales

9 Recent changes, prompted by military sentiments, have modified the absolute
freedom of divorce in Russia.

10 J. P. Lichtenberger, Divorce: A Social Interpretation, McGraw-Hill, 1931, p. 110.
The figures for 1935 were kindly compiited for me by Professor Frank H. Hankins,
from W. F. Willcox, Studies in American Demography, Cornell University Press,
1940, p. 342; League of Nations Yearbook, 1940; and S. A. Stouffer and L. M. Spencer,
"Recent Increases in Marriage and Divorce," American Journal of Sociology, Janu-
ary, 1939, pp. 551-554.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 623

Some true comprehension of the instability of the monogamous family
in America today can be gleaned from the following table, in which
marriage rates, divorce rates, and divorces per marriage are assembled:

MARRIAGES AND DIVORCES PER 1,000 OF THE POPULATION

Ratio of

Marriages per Divorces per Marriage to

Year 1,000 Population^ 1,000 Population™ Divorce™

1890 8.72 0.53 16.3

1895 8.57 0.58 14.6

1900 9.01 0.73 12.3

1905 9.60 0.81 11.9

1910 10.25 0.92 11.0

1915 10.67 1.07 9.9

1920 10.83 1.39 7.7

1925 10.52 1.55 * 6.7

1935 10.41 1.71 6.09

1937 11.00 1.90 5.78

1940 11.80

The divorce rate more than tripled within 45 years. There was exactly
one divorce to every six marriages in 1935. Should divorce continue to
increase at the present rate, there will soon be one divorce for every
marriage, and marriages will have little permanence. Let us hope that,
before this happens, marriage and the family will be brought under scien-
tific and sociological controls that will eliminate a number of the factors
which work most powerfully today to increase the divorce rate, especially
ignorance of the major facts and responsibilities of sex.

The divorce rate by states varies greatly, mainly as a result of their
widely different divorce laws. The following table shows the frequency
of divorce in the ten highest and the ten lowest states in 1929:

DIVORCE RATE PER 100,000 OF THE POPULATION, 1929 14

Highest Lowest

Nevada ! . ... 28.1 South Carolina 0.00

Oklahoma 3.48 District of Columbia 0.24

Oregon 3.38 New York 0.41

Texas 3.20 North Carolina 0.55

Wyoming 3.15 Delaware 0.73

Washington 2.90 New Jersey 0.75

Montana 2.77 Connecticut 0.77

California 2.74 Pennsylvania 0.82

Missouri 2.72 North Dakota 0.83

Arkansas 2.67 Massachusetts 0.84

It is obvious that the extremely high rate for Nevada is due to the
short residence requirement of six weeks for outsiders who wish to avail
themselves of the civilized Nevada legislation. The overwhelming

11 Lichtenberger, Divorce: A Social Interpretation, McGraw-Hill, 1931, p. 146.
™Ibid., p. 143.

13 Ibid., p. 152.

14 Ibid., p. 114. Detailed divorce statistics for recent years in the United States
are difficult to obtain, since their icgular collection ended with the year 1932.

624 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

majority of the divorces granted in Nevada are awarded to non-residents.
The divorce rate for permanent residents of Nevada is very low, only
about 5 per cent of the total divorces granted in the state being given to
actual Nevada residents — another proof that ease of divorce does not lead
to divorce excesses.

The instability of the monogamous family in the United States is even
greater than divorce statistics would indicate, for there are thousands of
desertions which never come into the courts as the basis for a definite
divorce action. As Ernest R. Mowrer has pointed out in his notable book
on Family Discordj desertion is the "poor man's divorce." Desertion is
especially prevalent in the poverty group. Divorce, on the other hand,
is confined mainly to the middle and upper classes. We shall devote a
later section to a consideration of the extent and causes of family deser-
tion.

A number of explanations have been offered for the marked increase
of divorce in the United States. Bertrand Russell, for example, thinks
that "family feeling is extremely weak here, and the frequency of divorce
is a consequence of this fact. Where family feeling is strong, for ex-
ample in France, divorce will be comparatively rare, even if it is equally
easy."15 Divorce is a symptom of deeper social trends, which have
undermined the moral and economic basis of the monogamous family.
Adultery, cruelty, and desertion may not be more prevalent today than
sixty years ago. We have no way of telling. It is possible that the less-
ening of the social taboos and the general easing up of conventions have
given many couples the courage to come out into the open and end their
incompatibility by legal divorce. Moreover, divorce has also been made
cheaper in many areas.

The1 growth of industry and the increase of wealth in the United
States in the twentieth century undoubtedly provide one explanation of
the phenomenon of increasing divorce. As we pointed out in an earlier
chapter, general social cohesion and, consequently, family cohesion, has
declined, while all classes have been infected with an eagerness to live
on an ever-rising scale. The unhappiness produced by readjustments and
disappointed ambitions has had its repercussions in the family, particu-
larly in the case of young married couples. A psychological explanation
for increased divorce is the strong feeling of individualism among con-
temporary men and women. This has reacted against the tolerant give-
and-take attitude required in the monogamous family relationship.
Concurrently, female emancipation bolstered woman's ego and independ-
ence, and helped to destroy the paternal type of family. The feminist
movement, while not handing woman a passport to license, has made her
more self-assertive and endangered the old type of family stability.
Equally demoralizing to stable marriage is woman's increasing participa-
tion in industry, to which we have already called attention. For the

15 Marriage and Morals, Liveright, 1929, p. 23.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 625

urban working class, the home has tended to become little more than a
night lodging-place. When the effects of the prevailing zeal for pleasure
and the abnormal life in tenement or apartment house dwellings are
added, it can be seen that the conventional family life, particularly in
urban centers, is fading away. Since industrialism has been undermin-
ing the home for many years, we now have a generation of undomesti-
<?ated children who, in turn, when they marry, are prone to form unstable
unions.

Bertrand Russell insists that the modern father is losing his former
position in society. Among the proletariat, he is so busy earning a
living that he rarely sees his children, and when he does see them, usu-
ally on Sundays, he scarcely knows how to behave towards them.
Further, Lord Russell observes that the state is increasingly taking
over parental responsibilities, most emphatically among the submerged
classes, where the father frequently cannot afford to feed or clothe his
offspring decently. Incidentally, it may be noted that the depression
after 1929 produced a very notable increase in desertion. The family
courts are clogged. Children, bred in the shadow of "home relief," are
losing that pride in the father which used to be a natural heritage.
The paternal status in the family has certainly decayed as contem-
porary civilization has progressed. This is true both among the upper
classes, where family instability seems most marked, and among the
lower classes, where poverty does not permit the father to be much of
a parent. Among the middle classes at present the father is of most
importance, for so long as he earns a good income he can provide
adequately for his offspring and he has a certain amount of leisure to
devote to their development. A greater sense of family responsibility,
too, has remained here than among the richer classes.

Another vital factor in the increase of divorce, frequently over-
looked, is that we have strict formal standards of sexual morality.
Hence infidelity is commonly regarded as the greatest transgression,
and the wronged partner in the family usually feels that both pride
and decency require a divorce action. In a country like France,
fidelity is not considered the most important factor for the success of
a marriage, and adultery is not so likely to provoke the husband or
wife, when it is discovered, to petition for divorce. In France, each
member of the family is more free to follow the dictates of his con-
science and wishes, and the family is not so frequently split and shat-
tered through divorce and separation. In short, the Stress laid by our
mores on sexual fidelity as the indispensable factor in the marital rela-
tionship develops a spirit of hypocrisy in marriage which, combined with
the amazing ignorance of sex, is a large factor in divorce.

The Causes of Divorce in the United States

The formal causes for the granting of divorces in the United States
from 1887 to 1929 are presented in the table on page 626.

626 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

REASONS FOR GRANTING DIVORCES, 1887-1929 16

Cause 1887-1906 1916 1922 1929

Cruelty 21.8% 28.3% 34.5% 40.8%

Desertion 38.9 36.8 32.8 29.6

Adultery 16.3 11.5 10.9 8.3

Combination of Causes .... 9.4 8.6 8.7 6.8

Failure to Provide 3.7 4.7 4.2 3.9

Drunkenness 3.9 3.4 1.0 1.8

Others 6.1 6.8 7.8 8.8

These formal causes of divorce, which are listed as the legal grounds
in actual divorce cases, are frequently accepted by writers as the literal
and true causes of family instability. To do so is, however, extremely
naive, and such authors give a misleading view of the major causes of
divorce.

In the first place, the cause which is offered in court is, all too fre-
quently, entirely fictitious and dictated solely by legal and other con-
siderations which make it convenient to advance that particular ground
for a divorce. In New York State, for example, where adultery is the
only usual ground on which divorce is granted, the applicant must
allege adultery by the other party. Consequently, it is extremely com-
mon to frame a case of fictitious adultery, to be brought into court as
evidence. If friends will not perform this service, there are professional
adultery "fixers" of both sexes who will stage the frame-up. They are
known to every good divorce lawyer. Hence adultery may be the ground
advanced to cover a score of different reasons for wishing the divorce.
In Nevada, the most common ground for divorce is "extreme cruelty."
This suffices as an adequate legal cause and is, at the same time, less likely
than most others to afford the basis for sensational newspaper publicity.
The fact that Nevada and several other states with relatively easy
divorce laws accept "cruelty" as a legal basis for divorce accounts for
the great increase in cruelty as a formal cause for demanding divorce and
as a ground for granting it.

Even where the cause for divorce alleged in court is a real cause,
it is all too frequently a purely superficial one. Suppose, for example,
that the cause alleged is desertion and that a husband has actually de-
serted his wife in the case. The real cause for divorce lies in the reason
for desertion. Was it from sheer boredom, the result of frequent quarrels,
the product of sexual incompatibility, or the effect of chronic economic
impoverishment? • Moreover, if it was boredom, why was the man bored?
We cannot accept as adequate the answer once given by a Negro defend-
ant in such a case, to the effect that "Well, Jedge, Ah done guess Ah's
just lost mah taste fur that ar woman." For the real causes of divorce
we thus have to turn to studies of sex life and family instability, such as
have been made by G. B. Hamilton, Katharine Bement Davis, Dorothy
Bromfield Bromley, Ernest R. Groves, W. F. Ogburn, W. F. Robie, and

1(5 Lichtenborger, Divorce: A Social Interpretation, McGraw-Hill, 1931, p. 131.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 627

others, and to statistics of family income and studies of family budgets.

Probably the greatest reason for the downfall of the monogamous mar-
riage and the emergence of a desire for divorce is found in the current
ease of marriage. In most states, marriage can be contracted almost
instantaneously. Marriages which are entered into as a result of a week-
end flair for adventure or during a period of intoxication are not likely to
prove successful or enduring.

Another often neglected but important incitement to divorce is brought
about when marriages are entered into without any particular enthusiasm
on the part of one of the persons involved. These marriages may proceed
out of kindheartedness and an unwillingness to rebuff pathetic affection
and intense devotion. In such cases, it is frequent that the man has not
even realized he has proposed marriage. Some casual remark has been
misinterpreted; the man finds himself trapped in an embarrassing situ-
ation and does not have the courage to be candid. Sinclair Lewis's por-
trayal of how Babbitt entered into his engagement and marriage is a
more frequent occurrence than the ordinary layman appreciates. Women
also frequently-give an impression of consent to a proposal when they had
no such intention, a soft answer being employed to turn aside disappoint-
ment; and find themselves so implicitly committed to marriage that
they enter into it. Marriage and the family impose enough difficulties
and responsibilities upon those who enter upon the conjugal estate with
great initial enthusiasm. Where this is lacking, there is likely to be
resentment and restlessness from the beginning.

The failure to have children seems to promote divorce and family
instability, especially where there are few other cohesive forces. In
1928, some 63 per cent of all divorces were granted to parties where there
were no children involved. Some 20.5 per cent of the divorces were given
in cases where there was only one child. One authority has estimated
that 70 per cent of childless marriages in the United States ultimately
wind up in the divorce court. The impact of increasing divorce upon
children is, thus, less serious than many suppose, since there are few
children in the families broken up by divorce.

Studies of family discord and instability reveal the frequency of eco-
nomic causes. The pride of the wife and her natural desire for display
suffer severely when her husband cannot provide enough income for even
the necessities. A man may become disgruntled with his wife because
she does not maintain a neat and tidy home and an attractive table,
though the responsibility for this failure may rest primarily upon his
own inadequacy as a provider. The mechanism of "projection" fre-
quently comes into play here. The guilty party does not recognize his
faults and blames his partner for the inadequacies. Economic insecurity
and worries put the nerves of both husband and wife on edge and lead to
quarrels, a sense of discouragement and futility, and an unwholesome
atmosphere in the home. At times, the economic inadequacy becomes
so great that it is literally impossible to keep the home together.

Certainly, one of the most important causes of family instability is

628 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

basic sexual ignorance. Husbands are all too frequently over-aggressive
and brutal at the outset. Wives suffer from emotional frigidity, morbid
fears, and psychological unpreparedness. Sinclair Lewis's portrayal of
the wedding night of Elmer Gantry provides an excellent illustration of
a deplorably frequent situation. Closely related to sex ignorance is the
matter of sexual incompatibility, a fact which is likely to become known
only after the marriage relationship has been made. Another associated
cause of unsatisfactory marriage relations is venereal disease, whether
known or unknown to one or the other of the partners before marriage.
A husband may imagine that he has been cured of gonorrhea, but has a
chronic case and infects his wife after marriage. Or a woman may be
suffering from syphilis, knowingly or unknowingly, and the husband does
not discover it until the wife has a series of stillbirths.

Though this fact is rarely mentioned in any divorce statistics or
publicity, it is pretty generally agreed by expert students that sexual
ignorance and incompatibility are the foremost causes of marital discord.
Judge George A. Bartlett, one of the most experienced of the Reno divorce
court judges, who presided over more than 20,000 divorce cases, was of
the opinion that more marriages fail because of sexual incapacity or
ignorance on the part of one or both of the partners than from any other
cause: "Of all the factors that contribute to happy marriage, the sex
factor is by far the most important. Successful lovers weather storms
that would crush frail semi-platonic unions."

But many marriages, which are originally founded upon romantic en-
thusiasm and in which the sexual adjustment is satisfactory, go on the
rocks because of unsatisfactory technique in the way of keeping the
monogamous relationship attractive. This problem has become prevalent
primarily as the result of the leisure brought about by the machine.
Formerly, when almost the entire energy and time of husband and wife
were devoted to satisfying the family needs, it was hardly necessary to
find in each other a stimulating companion. With leisure time, the
deadly intimacy of the average monogamous relationship is a menace to
the marriage. If one were to sit down and design the situation most
perfectly adapted to the destruction of the sentiment and novelty so
essential to long-continued amorousness, he would arrive at something
bearing a very close resemblance to the monogamous family, as at present
conducted. It is difficult to refute the facts pointed out by H. L.
Mencken in the following quotation:

Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down strangeness
[between the sexes] . It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy that
is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact £t too many points, and
too steadily. By and by, all the mystery of the relation is gone, and they stand
in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thus that 'maximum of tempta-
tion' of which Shaw speaks has within itself the seeds of its own decay. A hus-
band begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy
and so willing. He ends by making Machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the
eyery-day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, am-
bitions, secrets, malaises and business; a proceeding about as romantic as having

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 629

his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the
native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get
into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any appearance of
gusto and spontaneity to it.17

As we have pointed out in an earlier section of the chapter, the in-
creasing independence of woman has been a significant cause of the
increase of divorce. Women are no longer subjected to economic slavery
at the hands of husbands. Many a woman, if she does not like her
husband or if he is a poor provider, need not continue to suffer from
domestic unhappiness or impoverishment. She can get out and earn her
own living, divorcing her unsatisfactory spouse and remaining inde-
pendent of him, until she makes a more satisfactory marriage. The
lessening of public opprobrium against divorce and the tendency to accept
it more as a matter of course has undoubtedly made divorce somewhat
more frequent. But it can hardly be alleged that this is an underlying
cause of divorce. It simply makes dissatisfied parties to a marriage less
reluctant to take public steps to terminate the unsatisfactory union. The
decline of supernatural religion has eliminated for many the fear of
hellfire as an inhibition against starting a divorce action.

There are other real causes of divorce, but those which we have listed
above — ease of marriage, indifference to marriage at the outset, child-
lessness, economic insecurity, the growing economic independence of
women, sexual maladjustment, monogamous boredom, a more tolerant
public opinion relative to divorce, and the decline of supernatural reli-
gion as a brake on divorce — account for the overwhelming majority of
divorces and desertions, and the many unhappy families where divorce
never actually takes place. The latter instances are frequently over-
looked by students of marital problems, but, as Ludwig Lewisohn sug-
gested in his book, Don Juan, they may account for a far greater degree
of human misery and suffering than complete marital ruptures involving
divorce.

Some Remedies for Divorce and Family Instability

The rational solutions of the deplorable prevalence of divorce today
are naturally suggested by the foregoing realistic approach to the causes
of divorce. In the first place, marriage should be made more difficult.
Only companionate marriage of youth, if this ever becomes prevalent,
should be permitted to be initiated without prolonged reflection. But
even a companionate marriage should not be contracted lightheartedly.
So slight a restriction as the New York State law, which required a delay
of 72 hours between the acquisition of the marriage license and the
wedding ceremony, reduced the number of marriages in the state by 6,610
during the first year of its operation. At least, there was this decrease
in the number of marriages in 1937, and certainly it could be attributed
mainly to the chastening effect of the new law. It would seem reasonable

17 Mencken, In Defense of Women, Knopf, 1922, pp. 109-110.

630 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

to suggest that a six-month period might be required between the declara-
tion of intent to marry and the consummation of this intention. If
Sweden can demand that married couples wait a year to decide whether
or not they wish a divorce, certainly it is not excessive to demand that
half this time be required for reflection on the part of those who are
going to undertake an experiment with far more serious social conse-
quences than divorce. Nothing much can be done about marriages
which are unwisely contracted as a result of pity or kindheartedness,
without benefit of either passion or enthusiasm. This is purely a per-
sonal matter which can hardly be reached either by public education or
legislation. It may well be emphasized, however, that a broken heart
over a broken engagement is less pathetic than an unsuccessful marriage
and a broken heart after divorce.

We can never expect any satisfactory solution of the problem of divorce
and desertion unless we make it possible for all able-bodied and energetic
persons to earn a decent and respectable livelihood. Few families, how-
ever satisfactorily adjuster! in other respects, can successfully weather
prolonged misery and impoverishment. Even if there is no actual deser-
tion or divorce, there is bound to be much suffering and discontent.
Moreover, children cannot be adequately cared for in the midst of eco-
nomic inadequacy and insecurity. Just how we shall be able to realize
this adequate income for all is quite another question, but we have already
made it plain that we have the natural resources and technological equip-
ment in the United States to provide plenty for everybody with the
greatest of ease.

Perhaps the most important remedy for divorce is realistic sex edu-
cation with respect to the facts and responsibilities of the marriage
relationship. And it is highly desirable that this education be acquired
before marriage. A few weeks of bungling may undermine what might
otherwise be a thoroughly satisfactory marriage. If we wish to keep the
monogamous family intact, marriage manuals like those by W. F. Robie
and his successors will probably accomplish far more than many volumes
of savage legislation against divorce. The sex purists, who are most
violent against freedom of divorce and are most scandalized by its
prevalence, are themselves mainly responsible for the existence of mental
attitudes and ignorance which bring about more family discord than any
other single cause. As a phase of sex education, there should be thorough
instruction in birth control methods. Many a family is undermined be-
cause of being burdened by children who come before the family is ready
to take care of them, or arrive in too great numbers to be handled in an
average family situation. Compulsory medical examination of both
parties before a marriage license is granted would go far toward removing
the factor of venereal disease as a cause of marital difficulties.

Much more should be accomplished in the way of improving the
attractiveness and novelty of monogamous situations. Many of the
more repellent forms of that familiarity which breeds indifference, if not
contempt, could be avoided by those who are keenly alive to the realities.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 631

Marion Cox once suggested that periodic vacations from marriage rela-
tions should be provided for.18 Students of sex relations and pairing
arrangements among apes have found that this works well in stabilizing
primate affections and keeping the pairing arrangement intact. It might
achieve as much for human beings. But it will prove difficult to accom-
plish much in the way of improving the attractiveness of monogamy
unless decent living standards can be secured and maintained. There is
little possibility of novelty and surprise where a large family is packed
into a slum apartment or a run-down farm dwelling.

Many have sensibly suggested that we emphasize the work of the
domestic relations courts rather than place so much reliance upon divorce
courts in the handling of marital problems. There is much to be said in
support of this proposal. A reconciliation may often be substituted for
what would otherwise be separation, desertion, and divorce. Unfortu-
nately, the domestic relations courts have hitherto been almost wholly
concerned with discovering the family basis of juvenile delinquency.

It is obvious that no good will be achieved in any campaign against
divorce by attempting to reduce the economic independence of women
or to whip up public opinion against divorce, even if such results were
possible in our day.

Much interest has developed of late in marriage counselors, family
advice bureaus, and family clinics. In these, an effort is made to discover
the causes of marital discord, and to reduce or remove them by the
application of psychology and social work principles. One of the most
successful of these clinics is the Bureau of Marriage Counsel and Educa-
tion, which has been maintained for some years in New York City by
Dr. Valeria H. Parker. It has been stated that Dr. Parker has prevented
over 2,500 divorces in four years. Certainly, much can be done when
the chief cause of discord is not rooted in factors such as economic stress
and sterility, which lie beyond the reach or control of the counselor.
On the other hand, there is always the danger that, despite good inten-
tions, the basic principles of social science may be violated in these clinics.
This danger has been well stated by Kingsley Davis, who concludes that
to regard family clinics "as applying scientific efficacy to the tragic prob-
lems of personal relations strikes me as a violation of fact." 19

When it comes to the matter of suggesting divorce legislation, it would
probably be difficult to propose anything more satisfactory than the
Scandinavian laws. These provided for divorce in all cases of marital
discord after a year of reflection. Temporary anger, sulking, or de-
spondency are not likely to endure for a year. Where the application
was renewed after the passage of twelve months it was assumed that the
family should be put asunder, making due provision for proper support

18 Mencken, In Defense of Women, pp. 110-112.

19 Dr. Parker's work is described . with enthusiasm by Greta Palmer in an article
entitled "Marriage Repair Shop," in the Survey Graphic, January, 1942; Professor
Davis's qualms are embodied Jn an article on "A Critique of the Family Clinic
Idea," in the American Sociological Review, April, 1936, pp. 236 ff.

632 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

of dependent children. The Scandinavian legislation also made possible
immediate divorce for causes sufficiently serious to warrant expeditious
action. Some more radically inclined persons recommended following
the lead of Soviet Russia, which made divorce immediately available
upon the desire of either party. It seems to the writer that the Swedish
procedure is preferable, though the Russian practices are certainly
far saner than such absurdities at the other extreme as the legislation of
South Carolina.20

It is often asserted that easy divorce inevitably leads to a veritable
tidal wave of divorces. The evidence does not bear out any such asser-
tion. The divorces in Sweden only increased from 847 in 1915 to 1,040
in 1917, and 1,310 in 1920, the latter being an insignificant figure in
proportion to the total population of Sweden. In Soviet Russia as a
whole, under the freest possible divorce procedure, the divorces per capita
were less than those in the United States. Sex education, sexual freedom,
and economic security for the whole body of the people had evidently
proved more effective in Russia in preventing a high divorce rate than has
severe restrictive legislation in many other countries. The experience
of the State of Nevada is also highly illuminating. It is literally true
that, so far as the legal aspects are concerned, a permanent resident of
Nevada may decide at the breakfast table that he wishes a divorce, and
may procure one before luncheon. Yet the percentage of divorces per
capita among the permanent residents of Nevada is lower than the
per capita divorce rate in New York State, with adultery as the sole
loophole for those who seek divorce.

Any intelligent solution of the divorce problem must carry with it the
termination of the abuses of the alimony racket. This is one of the two
leading rackets connected with divorce, the first being the collusion and
fixing of evidence, particularly evidence of adultery. At the present
time, the alimony racket is a fertile field for cultivation by thrifty and
ruthless gold-diggers. They snare wealthy husbands, live with them
long enough to provide a semblance of honest intent, sue for divorce, and
get awarded a large alimony — sometimes as much as one third of the
husband's income. Often these large alimonies are awarded when the
wife who secures the divorce is perfectly able to take care of herself.
Aside from the purely racketeering aspects of alimony procedure, there
are other abuses in the contemporary practice. Alimony for the divorced
wife has more logic in it, in case the husband divorces the wife, but
alimony is very frequently given today when the wife asks for the
divorce of her own volition. While no sane person can doubt the moral
right of granting reasonable alimony to a dependent divorced woman,
providing the marriage relationship has been long enduring, there is little
justification for alimony payments to a young and recently married
woman who is perfectly capable of caring for herself. The courts, all
too often, fail to consider the question of need and desert when awarding

20 There is no legal ground for divorce in South Carolina.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 633

alimony. One of the most illogical abuses in the alimony situation is
the frequent practice of incarcerating husbands for nonpayment of ali-
mony. This is akin to imprisonment for debt, which has long since been
abandoned as ethically reprehensible and financially illogical.

Alimony is no new principle or practice. It goes back to the earliest
historical times. The principle definitely appears in the Code of Ham-
murabi, some two thousand years before Christ. Such practices were
developed more thoroughly by the Greeks and Romans, though in cases
of divorce by mutual consent the parties involved had to make their own
private arrangements about such matters. The medieval church strongly
influenced the development of alimony practices. Since it regarded the
family as indissoluble, alimony payments were made perpetual. The
Protestant cults introduced into alimony definitely punitive concepts,
alimony being a punishment for the guilt of the husband. This concept
has survived, since the courts tend to base the amount of alimony more
upon the degree of the husband's guilt than upon the needs of the divorced
wife. The more enlightened divorce codes of our day have eliminated
the earlier concepts and abuses with respect to alimony. Sweden allows
alimony only in cases of actual want. In Soviet Russia, where divorce
by mutual consent has prevailed, any question of payment to one of the
parties is a matter for private arrangement without any legal compul-
sion. Certain American states, such as Massachusetts, North Dakota,
and Ohio have granted the husband the right to alimony under certain
specific conditions, where the husband is the injured party in the divorce
case. Few expert students of the alimony question approve the granting
of alimony to both sexes as a solution of the problem. This device is
simply a manifestation of the old error that two wrongs can make a right.

Any sane solution of the problem of alimony would require that the
punitive aspects of alimony be completely wiped away and that im-
prisonment for nonpayment for alimony be terminated. The matter of
alimony awards should be determined wholly by the needs of the de-
pendent wife and children. Legitimate rights of both of these should be
fully protected in divorce cases, though there should never be alimony
payments that would encourage the divorced woman to avoid seeking
remunerative work or satisfactory marriage. Least of all, should a
divorced woman be allowed to collect alimony from a former husband
after she has remarried. At present, alimony does not automatically
cease upon the remarriage of the divorced woman. There have been cases
where married women have collected alimony from two or more former
husbands at the same time.

The Future of the Family

Few social problems are more solemnly discussed than that of the
future of the human family. There are many who predict that it will
ultimately disappear, but even if this should prove to be true it will not
take place for many generations to come. One should be clear just what
is meant by the discussion of the future of the family and the possibility

634 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

of its disappearance. That which is seriously threatened by contem-
porary developments is the old rural patriarchal family and the notion
of indissoluble monogamy. Definite pairing arrangements between
males and females do not appear to be in the slightest jeopardy. In
fact, there are more marriages, and, hence at least more temporary
families, than ever before in history. This is notably true of the United
States, where, as we have seen, the marriage rate is increasing rapidly.
If companionate marriage is introduced, the marriage rate will be even
more markedly increased. Even the radical developments in Soviet
Russia, which represented as drastic a social change as we may expect in
the civilized world for many years to come, did not seem to have lessened
the popularity of marriage. Therefore, while the older type of family,
which came down from a pastoral and agricultural economy, does seem
to be disintegrating and may disappear entirely, there appears to be no
reason whatever for predicting the end of marriage or even any decline
in its popularity. Indeed, if divorce becomes easier, it is likely that
many persons who now recoil from the idea of assuming a life-long
responsibility will be encouraged to contract matrimony and may be so
entranced therewith as to be induced to continue the arrangement in-
definitely. An interesting and amusing item in this connection is the
announcement that, in 1940, 18,913 marriage licenses were issued in
Heno, Nevada, while only 2,314 divorce suits were filed there.

The percentage of those married in the United States has increased in
the last fifty years. In 1890, 53.9 per cent of the male population was
married. In 1930, the figure stood at exactly 60 per cent. The per-
centage of married females in 1890 was 56.8, and in 1930 it had risen to
61.1 per cent. The marriage rate of 11.0 per 1,000 of the population in
the United States in 1937 was relatively high. The marriage rate in
Germany in 1937 was 9.1; in England, 8.7; in Italy, 8.7; in Canada, 7.9;
and in France, 6.6.

The possibility of the extinction of the human family at some distant
date in the future is, therefore, quite obviously a purely academic question.
But immediate future tendencies in the family are a matter of real prac-
tical concern. As Anderson and Lindeman have suggested, the increased
prevalence of urban life and the living conditions associated therewith
are likely to bestow far greater importance upon the mother. Obviously,
no changes in our cultural and social set-up will ever alter the biological
fact that women must bear the children. Woman's biological function
thus remains constant, whatever the degree or type of social changes
affecting the family. On the other hand, as we have already noted, the
father's importance in the family has been considerably lessened by recent
cultural and social changes. Moreover, social workers have pointed out
that keeping the mother and child together is a far more important matter
than keeping the father present in the family.

It is quite possible that the state will step in and take over a good
many of the father's responsibilities in the way of supporting mothers and
children. It is obvious that the state and other agencies have already

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 635

intruded markedly into former family responsibilities and services.21
The state now provides for the education of children. Public health
agencies, nursing associations, child guidance clinics, recreational centers
and many other child welfare bodies supply forms of aid to families which
were formerly a purely domestic responsibility. The increasing preva-
lence of mothers7 pensions is another indication that the state may assume
an ever greater responsibility for supporting mothers and dependent
children. The National Youth Administration helps to care for older
children, and the Civilian Conservation Corps has also done much along
this line. The permanent family, under male parental dominion, owed
its cohesiveness and enduring qualities primarily to the fact that there
were indispensable responsibilities which only the family could supply.
Now that this set of conditions have been greatly modified we cannot
doubt that such changes will have a marked effect upon the future of
the family.

With the growing prevalence of Fascism and Communism it is perhaps
relevant to inquire as to just what influences these new forms of political
and economic life are likely to bring to bear upon the human family.
In this respect, Fascism has produced many paradoxes and contradic-
tions. The chief marital policy of Fascism is to increase the birth rate,
so as to provide more children for future cannon fodder. Hence Fascism
tends to encourage marriage by taxes on bachelors, the restriction of di-
vorce, and so on. But its zeal for a larger population leads it to policies
which work in the opposite direction. It encourages births out of wed-
lock and tends to eliminate the whole conception of bastardy. Mothers'
pensions are favored to support unmarried mothers who have borne
future soldiers. Fascism thus encourages the extremely radical notion
that procreation outside of wedlock is socially tolerable if not commend-
able.

Communism has thus far favored free divorce, but marriage continues
to be popular in Soviet Russia. As the military emergency in Soviet
Russia has become more marked, there has been a definite inclination to
clamp down on some of the earlier manifestations of sexual freedom.
The government has, for example, assumed a less tolerant attitude toward
abortions, and is following the Fascist program in encouraging a high
birth rate. Soviet Russia appears likely to encourage the continuance
of the family because it feels that the latter is indispensable to the desired
increase of population for national defense.

If civilization survives the present world crisis, we may safely predict
that the family will be greatly modified, but that marriage will continue
to be as popular as ever, though undoubtedly readjusted in terms of social
rationality. Affection will come to play a larger role in keeping the family
together than sheer economic pressure. Hence those influences which in-
crease affection, such as children, mutual interest, avoidance of excessive
intimacy, and the like, will need to be stressed and encouraged. Super-

-1 See below, pp. 645-648.

636 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

naturalism, intolerance, ignorance, and dogma will have an ever lessening
authority and influence over family life. The latter will be reconstructed
in harmony with scientific facts and a reconsideration of social welfare.
Such a readjustment must certainly involve thoroughgoing sex education,
the sanction and encouragement of companionate marriages, and the
imposition of greater restrictions and responsibilities upon permanent
unions, rational divorce legislation and easier divorce, and the provision
of economic conditions which will bestow upon the family the material
foundations for an enduring and successful matrimonial arrangement.
The family of the future will be kept together because the parties wish to
have their marriage endure and because the family situation is worth
preserving. If we desire to increase the number of marriages which can
be both personally congenial and socially worth while, it will impose
upon us the necessity of bringing about economic security and other
general living conditions which are reasonably compatible with success-
ful monogamy on the part of the masses.

The future of marriage, like the future of everything else in American
life, is closely tied up with the second World War.22 If Germany should
win the war there would be increased prestige for the marriage practices
of the Nazis. These are paradoxical. On the one hand, we find the
Nazis praising the old-fashioned virtues of the home, and the mother as*
the docile parent of young Nazis. At the same time, they welcome the
birth of children out of wedlock, in this way undermining the conven-
tional family morality. It is probable, however, that Nazi support
would be placed behind the old patriarchal family. The struggle for a
large population is likely to subside in Germany after the war is over.

An Anglo-American-Russian victory, or a negotiated peace, coming
fairly quickly, would bolster the family ethics of the United States and
Britain and give them a greater opportunity to contest the future with
Nazi and Soviet family ideas and practices.

Should an Anglo-American-Russian victory over Germany or a stale-
mate throw the Old World into the hands of Russia, there would be great
gains for the unconventional family ideals and practices of the Soviet
Union. These are the new sex ethics, separated entirely from religious
control, namely, what we usually call "free love," easy divorce, and
legalized abortion. But there is little reason to think that the family
would be abandoned or that marriage would be less popular. The silly
myth that Russia has approved communism in women is utterly without
foundation. If a long stalemate and chaos come in the wake of war,
we may look forward to the breakdown of the family and to generations
of marital disorder, rapine, and lust.

Since there is a considerable prospect of a long war, we may profitably
consider some obvious effects of war on marriage and the family. In
the first place, war undermines the conventional sex and family morals.

22 For authoritative discussions of war and the family, see J. H. S. Bossard, "War
and the Family," American Sociological Review, June, 1941, pp. 330-344; and
Willard Waller, "War and the Family" (a brochure), Dryden Press, 1940.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 637

All is regarded as good which helps along victory. A special wartime
morality exists for the soldier group. Unconventional sexual behavior
was justified in the first World War as an aid to licking the Kaiser, and
it may be so justified in the second World War as an important item in
aiding the triumph over Hitler and the Mikado.

In the second place, families are at least temporarily broken up by war.
Fathers, sons, and brothers go to war or to work in war industries.
Women also often leave homes to engage in war work. Family income
may be lessened and standards of living lowered. Economic bonds of
the family are loosened. Divorces tend to increase and unconventional
sex behavior is encouraged.

In the third place, more males than females are killed off in war and
the sex ratio is upset, there tending to' be an excess of females. The
death of husbands and other male wage-earners produces serious emo-
tional and economic situations. Chaotic economic conditions after war
and inability to find husbands stimulate prostitution and unconventional
sex unions.

In the fourth place, war, especially at the outset, stimulates hasty
marriages, contracted on the spur of the moment or in a burst of idealism.
These "marry-and-run" unions prove more unstable than marriages con-
tracted in peace time. This is another way in which war contributes to
marital instability.

In the fifth place, wars have usually made for a radical overhauling
of the sexual folkways. This may prove a gain, but it is an expensive
way to liberalize sexual ethics. As Professor Willard Waller has sug-
gested, it is like burning down a house to get roast pig.

In the sixth place, the killing off of young men increases the difficulty
of women in finding husbands and reduces the marriage and birth rates.

Finally, wars tend, at least temporarily, to elevate the economic and
social status of women, and may gain for them new political rights.

On the whole, one may safely conclude that a long war will at least
temporarily undermine conventional sexual morality and family life.
In such a case, we cannot hope to escape from its demoralizing impact
upon our family life and marriage institutions.

The Unmarried Adult

Discussions of sex and marriage problems frequently revolve solely
about the consideration of the family and divorce. But a very consid-
erable social problem is involved in the matter of the unmarried adult.
There are, today, more single persons than divorced or deserted. In
1930, 34.1 per cent of the males, 15 years of age or older, were single and
26.4 per cent of the females, 15 years of age or older, were unmarried.
There were thus over 25 millions in the American population, past the
period of puberty, who were unmarried. In addition, there was a con-
siderable contingent — over 7 million — of the widowed, deserted, and
divorced. It is worthy of note that the proportion of the unmarried was

638 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

somewhat less in 1930 than at any other period since 1890. The in-
creased rate of marriage in the United States has naturally decreased the
relative proportion of the unmarried, since marriage has grown more
rapidly of late than the general increase of the population. But a large
residual element of unmarried still remains in the population.

A number of reasons have been assigned for the failure of so large a
proportion of the population to enter into what Malthus called "the
delights of domestic society." Economic inadequacy and insufficiency
undoubtedly accounts for a considerable amount of non-marriage. There
may not be sufficient income available to support children. This is
particularly important today when children, under conditions of city life,
have become an almost unmitigated financial liability.

The growth of economic and sexual freedom encourages and enables
many to obtain their sex satisfactions outside of matrimony. The ex-
tensive entry of women into industry and the professions makes it un-
necessary for an ever larger group of women to marry solely from
pecuniary reasons. The proportion of gainfully occupied women, 15
years and older, who have entered industry and professions has increased
very markedly in the last 50 years in the United States. Over half of
these are single, widowed, or divorced. In 1930 there were 10,632,227
women in all occupations, of whom 5,734,825 were single and 1,826,100
widowed or divorced.

Many psychological factors help to explain the existence of the un-
married contingent of the population. Feelings of inferiority and other
neurotic states may hold one back from seeking or securing matrimonial
opportunities. Fixations on the parents and faulty sex education may
effectively obstruct normal sexual aspirations and the consummation of
conjugality. Serious disappointments in love may exert their influence,
as well as entertaining too high ideals in the quest of a partner. Homo-
vScxuality and other sexual abnormalities very obviously stand in the way
of normal marriage relationships.

We may now consider some of the major results of non-marriage. The
most conspicuous one is the fact that a large group of persons of child-
bearing age are not contributing to population growth. While there is
a 'considerable amount of illegitimacy, procreation outside of wedlock is
not institutionally accepted and non-marriage certainly contributes
markedly to a lower birth rate than would exist if the unmarried had
entered into conjugal relations. Whether this is a disaster or a benefit
to society depends upon the social philosophy with which one approaches
the population problem. But the existence of any large number of un-
married persons of high ability does have its effect in the way of lessening
the potential level of population quality. If marriage be regarded as
conferring upon the married an enviable state of mind and social sur-
roundings, these advantages are obviously lost by the non-married. Yet,
since many of those who remain unmarried are psychologically unfitted
for normal marriage relations, their entry into wedlock might well pro-
duce more discord and unhappiness than satisfaction and well-being.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 639

Certain authorities contend that various types of evils, particularly
neurotic developments, arise from the absence of normal sexual relations
on the part of the unmarried, but, as Dr. Ira S. Wile and others have
pointed out, we must not assume that all the unmarried are celibate and
innocent of sexual experience. Dr. Ellen Klatt studied a group of un-
married women and found that 18 per cent of those under 18 years of age,
and over 60 per cent of those between 18 and 22 years of age had enjoyed
some active form of sex experience. Dr. G. V. Hamilton investigated a
group of professional men and women and found that 59 per cent of the
men and 47 per cent of the women had had sexual relations before
marriage. In some cases, this seems to have been a result of the fact
that marriage was anticipated. Katharine B. Davis's study of the sex
life of 1,200 unmarried college women revealed the fact that 61 per cent
had practiced masturbation, over half beginning before the age of 15.
Other studies have confirmed the impression that a large portion of the
unmarried have normal but noninstitutionalized sexual relations, while
many more practiced auto-erotic and homosexual relations. It is mainly
among those who are both unmarried and celibate that we need fear any
marked development of neurotic tendencies on account of the repression
of the sex instinct. Nevertheless, there seems to be a regrettable number
of this type in the population. But it must also be remembered that
there are many who enter into marriage relations and develop neuroses
because of their inability to initiate or sustain normal sex relations.

When we turn to the social pathology of the unmarried we find that
the unmarried show a per capita preponderance among cases of de-
pendency, mental instability, vagrancy, crime, and the patrons of prosti-
tution. Except in the case of the latter, we cannot assign the responsi-
bility directly to the unmarried state. We would expect to find a larger
number of dependents among the unmarried because the economic in-
adequacy is a major cause of the failure to marry. Likewise, many fail
to marry because they have been neurotic types from childhood. We
cannot assume that all the unmarried neurotics are neurotic because of
their failure to marry. Marriage responsibilities would be likely to make
such types even more neurotic. In the same way, vagrancy is likely to
be an outgrowth of mental instability and economic insufficiency, which
are more a cause of failure to marry than a direct result thereof. It is
only natural, however, to suppose that the absence of family responsi-
bilities lessens the restraint upon vagrant tendencies. When we come to
crime, it is logical to believe that absence of family restraints and re-
sponsibilities will remove some of the elements which deter people from
committing crime. But it is frequently true that criminality arises from
the very conditions of mental instability and poverty which prevent
marriage. In the matter of vice and prostitution it may be safely
assumed that the patronage of prostitutes is notably increased by the
presence of a large number of unmarried males in the population. But
studies have revealed the fact that prostitutes have many married cus-
tomers. Moreover, with the growing freedom of sex relations, unmarried

640 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

males are satisfying their sex desires to an ever greater degree through
relations with females not in the prostitute group.

A number of remedies suggest themselves for failure to marry and its
unsound social and personal results. Higher wages and salaries and
steadier employment are necessary, if we are going to make it possible
for many of those now unmarried to support a family. So long as they
are unable to do so it is better that they should not marry and beget a
number of dependent or inadequately reared children. Sex education
and mental hygiene services would help to eliminate many of the neurotic
conditions which stand in the way of marriage today. Companionate
marriage would offer a solution for those who are biologically and psy-
chologically fitted to marry but cannot or do not wish to assume the
responsibilities of a permanent union. If we wish to encourage procrea-
tion by the able unmarried, we shall have to do away with the various
social penalties imposed upon illegitimacy and bastardy. The further
development of a rational scheme of sex relations and mental hygiene
facilities will naturally take care of a good many causes and cases of
failure to marry. But there will be no permanent solution of the problem
until we have a sufficient economic readjustment to provide the material
basis for successful conjugality on the part of all able-bodied and
mentally healthy citizens.

Widows and Deserted Women

The number of widows in American society has increased along with
the general growth of population, but there is probably no more widow-
hood per capita than at earlier periods in our history. In 1930 there
were over 4,700,000 widowed females and over 2,000,000 widowed males.
It is estimated that some 400,000 newly widowed females are added
annually as a result of deaths of husbands from various causes. The
preponderance of widowed females is easily explained. Males are more
numerous in industry and arfc otherwise more exposed to the dangers in
moving about in contemporary life. Hence more males are killed in
accidents, travel, and in ordinary occupational activities. Moreover,
males who have lost their wives find it easier to contract a second mar-
riage, because age and widowhood seem to be less of a handicap to a
man than to a woman.

The deaths which produce widowhood result from a few outstanding
causes. About six deaths out of every ten prior to old age, which cost the
life of the male wage-earner, afe produced by tuberculosis, influenza-
pneumonia, heart disease and high blood pressure, and accidents. Cancer
and syphilis also play an important role in this mortality. Most of the
recent progress in reducing the mortality which leads to widowhood has
taken place in the successful attack upon pneumonia and tuberculosis.
The other leading causes of mortality still remain relatively constant,
though we may expect notable progress to be made in the next few years
in reducing the number of deaths caused by syphilis.

There are a number of deplorable personal and social effects of widow-

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 641

hood. The problem of dependency is aggravated as a result of the loss
of the earnings of the breadwinner. But the problems of a bereaved
home are more than economic. If the mother has to leave the home to
secure employment, or children have to go to work earlier than desirable,
it is difficult to provide for a normal and desirable type of home life and
education. The emotional difficulties of widowhood are serious and
numerous. The sorrow frequently brings a serious psychological shock.
Family associations are broken up. Sex starvation frequently results.
The transferring of all affection from the husband to the children may
create important difficulties of a psychological nature for both mother
and children. This is particularly the case if there is only one child.
Mental breakdowns and sheer dependency represent the extreme forms of
ravages created by widowhood.

The remedies for widowhood naturally fall under the heading of im-
mediate relief and preventive measures. Until recently, younger widows
and their children have ordinarily been taken care of by a system of
outdoor relief, either by public or private agencies. Most of the elderly
widows have been taken care of in private homes for the aged and in
our almshouses. Children, dependent as a result of widowhood, have
been cared for both through outdoor relief and through being placed in
public or private institutions for orphaned children. A more adequate
and civilized method of supporting widows and dependent children has
been more recently provided by the system of widows' pensions. The
first comprehensive mothers' pension law was passed in Illinois in 1911.
By 1930, all states except Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and New
Mexico had passed some sort of mothers' pension legislation, carrying
with it an1 annual expenditure of about 30 million dollars as relief aid of
this type. The Social Security Act of 1935 provided some federal and
state aid to widows and dependent children. More liberal and uniform
workmen's compensation laws will be essential to provide an adequate
and immediate income for widows. Both personal and social insurance
will need to be extended as a method of lessening the economic impact of
the death of wage-earners. Savings and thrift should be encouraged, but
this should be accompanied by assuring the solvency and reliability of
banks. Many an American widow has lost the family savings because
of our scandalous and numerous bank failures. Mental hygiene clinics
have done something in the way of providing psychological relief in the
case of both widows and children, but such facilities will need to be
greatly extended before they will be adequate.

If we are to prevent widowhood, we must make possible better medical
care for the masses. There will need to be improvements in preventive
medicine and in our methods of dealing with certain fatal and hitherto
unconquered diseases, and more stringent regulation of occupational and
transportation hazards.

We have already noted that desertion has been called the poor man's
divorce. We do not have the exact statistics with respect to the number
of desertions which we possess with respect to divorce and widowhood.

642 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

But certain estimates enable us to know that there is a considerable vol-
ume of desertion. From one third to one half of the divorce cases brought
to court list desertion as a cause of action. Whether desertion is the
fundamental cause of the family discord, it is likely to be a contributing
cause if so stated in the divorce proceeding. About 20 per cent of all
expenditures for family relief go for aid to deserted women and their
dependents. The most competent estimate that we have places the
annual number of desertions in the United States at around 50,000.

The^causes of family desertion are numerous and complicated, as is
the case with the causes for divorce. But they boil down to two basic
situations, namely, that family life is unattractive, or that, for one rea-
son or another, it cannot be successfully continued. The causes of the
latter situation arc primarily economic insufficiency, personal inadequacy
to meet the responsibilities of family life, and lack of proper technique
for making marriage relations successful. The great majority of deser-
tions are made by men. This is due to the fact that men depend less
upon their wives for support and are more easily drawn away from
family situations in quest of sexual novelty and new contacts.

There are a number of conditions which are most frequently associated
with family desertion, many of which naturally grow out of the fact
that it is mainly a lower-class phenomena. Deserters have been found
who have an inadequate education in many cases. They rate high in
lawlessness, some 20 per cent of them having court records. Many of
the desertions are associated with hasty youthful marriages. Personal
instability seems to play its part, since over 50 per cent of male deserters
are repeaters at the process. Abnormal alcoholic indulgence is frequently
associated with desertion. There is a relatively high proportion of
feeble-minded and psychopathic among family deserters. Desertion is
much more common in city families than in rural families, due to the
fact that the family renders less indispensable services in the city than
in the country and that there are more temptations in the city. Deser-
tions are more likely to take place in the case of mixed marriages, where
conflicts of race, religion, language, and the like exist, thus increasing
the problems of family adjustment. In an important study of 1,500 rep-
resentative cases of desertion Joanna C. Calcord found that about 76 per
cent of the cases arose from various forms of sex difficulties and from the
use of alcohol and narcotic drugs. Thirty-nine per cent was attributed
to the former and 37 per cent to the latter cause. Temperamental causes
and economic insufficiency accounted for the majority of the remaining
cases.

The social problems arising out of desertion are not markedly different
from those which grow out of bereavement and widowhood, except that
the element of personal sorrow may be rather less.23 Desertion imposes
the same heavy burden upon relief agencies and legislation which take
care of the destitution produced by desertion. The problems of the

23 For an excellent discussion of desertion as a social problem, see Charles Zunser,
"Family Desertion," in Social Service Review, June, 1932.

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 643

broken home, in relation to both mother and children, are the same as
in the case of widowhood. In some cases, where there are no children,
desertion may turn out to be a blessing rather than a calamity, since it
may terminate a family relationship which involved more quarreling and
discord than cordiality and satisfaction.

In attempting to solve the problem of desertion we must recognize
that it is a field chiefly for economic reform, mental hygiene work, and sex
education. As much as possible should be done to provide more adequate
sex instruction, to bring the psychopathic types into contact with guid-
ance clinics, and to increase the scope of the work of domestic relations
courts. Legislation to prevent hasty marriages and to discourage alto-
gether the marriages of the psychopathic and the feeble-minded is de-
sirable. Special social work agencies to deal with desertion cases would
be extremely helpful. It is particularly essential that any assistance
intended for those already married should be brought to bear in the
early years of marriage. There is little prospect of effective aid after
the discord and quarreling have become chronic. More adequate income
would prevent a number of cases of desertion, but this is a matter which
lies beyond the reach of the social worker or the mental hygiene adviser.

Illegitimacy as a Social Problem

Illegitimacy is a surprisingly common phenomenon in modern countries.
For example, in 1914 the illegitimate births in Austria amounted to 11.9
per cent of the total live births; in Denmark 11.5 per cent; in Bavaria
12.6 per cent; in Saxony 16 per cent; in Portugal 11 per cent; in Sweden
15.8 per cent. In certain of the European cities the rate was much
higher. Over a five year period from 1905 to 1909 the illegitimacy rate
in Budapest was 26.3, in Copenhagen 25.5; in Lyons 22.2; in Moscow 24;
in Munich 27.8; in Paris 25.5; in Stockholm 33.5; in Vienna 30.1.
These urban figures are somewhat inflated however, because a number of
the illegitimate births in urban hospitals represent deliveries of rural
mothers who come to the city for delivery, and the illegitimate birth is
therefore registered in the city where the delivery takes place. Sexual
freedom and the elimination of the whole conception of bastardy in Soviet
Russia, and the desire to breed ample cannon fodder in Fascist countries,
have of late tended to increase illegitimacy in European countries, as has
also the confusion incident to the second World War.

In the United States, while the illegitimacy rate is growing fairly rap-
idly, it is still far below representative European rates, especially in the
case of our white population. Among the Negroes the illegitimacy rate
tends to equal that of the European states with the highest illegitimacy
rates. In 1934, the illegitimacy rate for American Negroes was 15.15 per
cent. Samuel J. Holmes has completed the latest authoritative survey
of illegitimacy in the United States, that based upon 1934 figures. Tak-
ing into account both the white and the black population, the illegitimacy
rate was 3.9 per cent. In other words, out of every thousand live births,
39 of the babies were born out of wedlock. There were 35,000 white

644 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

bastards and 43,000 black ones. But the ratio of bastardy was more
than seven times higher among the blacks than it was among the whites.
The rate for whites was 2.04 per cent and for blacks the 15.15 per cent
mentioned above. Professor Holmes indicates that illegitimacy is defi-
nitely increasing in this country and accounts for the increase in the
following ways: (1) over-confidence in the effectiveness of simple and
inadequate birth control methods; (2) the economic effects of the de-
pression which have checked the marriage rate and produced a certain
amount of sexual and family demoralization; and (3) a lessening of the
stigma attached to illegitimacy.

Among the direct causes of illegitimacy are sexual ignorance and inex-
perience, inadequate birth control devices or incomplete knowledge of
how to use effective devices, pathological carelessness and indifference,
intoxication and mental defect. There are other more general and indi-
rect causes of illegitimacy. Such are increased sexual freedom, unaccom-
panied by adequate knowledge of birth control, low economic status
which is often associated with ignorance, bad living conditions which
make for sexual promiscuity, mental instability, and so on.

The burdens of illegitimacy fall most heavily upon the poor. With the
rich it is chiefly a matter of personal inconvenience or social humiliation.
Many of the evils associated with illegitimacy are as much due to social
intolerance and wrong-headedness as to the personal responsibility of
the parties directly involved. The antipathy toward the mother and
illegitimate child and the tendency to make them both outcasts is an
outrageous social error which should be speedily brought to an end in
any civilized era. The fact that illegitimate children rank relatively high
among the juvenile delinquents is also due mainly to the stigma which
society places upon the illegitimate child and the handicaps which are
thus imposed upon him. The fear of bearing an illegitimate child leads
to many abortions, with the unfortunate physical results which frequently
come therefrom. The economic problem, of rearing an illegitimate child
is also increased by the psychological obstacles which are added through
social antipathy. If one eliminates the traditional aspect of sin, it is thus
apparent that most of the evils associated with illegitimacy are socially
created and all of them are aggravated by the archaic social attitude
toward the problem. If this were changed the most important aspect of
illegitimacy would be that of adequate economic support for the mother
and child.

The remedial steps to be taken against illegitimacy are clearly indi-
cated by the situation. There should be better sex education and par-
ticularly better instruction in the use of birth control methods. Improved
economic conditions might enable many to marry who now find them-
selves unable to do so and hence risk illegitimacy through sex relations
outside of wedlock. Wholesale sterilization of the feeble-minded would
prevent the large volume of illegitimacy which is associated with feeble-
minded parentage. Better education, especially instruction in sex mat-
ters and birth control, as well as the improvement of economic conditions,

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 645

would help to reduce the especially notable volume of illegitimacy among
the Negroes in this country. Pending the time at which illegitimacy may
be reduced in those cases where it is desirable to do so, the whole idea of
bastardy, and the mental complexes associated therewith, should be com-
pletely swept away, as has already been done in Fascist countries and
Soviet Russia. After an illegitimate child is born it is too late to accom-
plish anything by terrorizing the mother or humiliating the child. The
child's future transcends any other consideration. His chances for devel-
opment into a useful citizen must not be lessened as a result of antiquated
ethical prejudices and mob psychology.

Child Problems and Child Care Outside the Family

Down to modern times the child contributed all of his labor to the
family, and the family gave the child such attention as he received in
the way of food, clothing and shelter, education, medical care, and the
like. The family had nearly complete control of the child and received
all his services in return. Now that the old authoritarian family is
breaking up and the rural economy is being superseded by an urban in-
dustrial age, the family no longer provides complete care for children,
does not exert full authority over children, and does not receive all of
the services of children. We may look briefly at some ways in which
the community and the state have stepped in to take over many respon-
sibilities for the child which once fell to the family.

Great progress has been made in protecting the health of the child since
a century ago, when the mother was usually delivered by a midwife and
doctored her children through various herbs and syrups. The develop-
ment of antiseptic methods in maternity cases and especially the recent
introduction of the drug sulfanilamide has greatly reduced the number of
maternity deaths at childbirth and saved many mothers to care for their
children. The control of communicable diseases and the epidemic dis-
eases of childhood have saved the lives of many thousands of children
who formerly died from diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and
the like. Improved knowledge of nutritional science has greatly reduced
deaths among young children. The community and the state have given
special attention to providing public medical care for children. Clinics
and state medicine in various forms have usually been made accessible
to children long before they are generally extended to adults. Gymna-
sium work and supervised play have also made their contributions to the
improvement of the physical health and resistance of children.

Even more solicitous has been the action of the more alert communities
in looking after the mental health of children. This has been due largely
to the fact that psychiatrists recognize the critical importance of child-
hood in relation to both mental health and disease. Psychological clinics
for children appeared in this country as early as 1896. But the move-
ment for mental health clinics for children, usually called child guidance
clinics, did not really begin to get under way until the National Com-
mittee for Mental Hygiene was created in 1909. Then the movement

646 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

grew rapidly. By 1914 there were a hundred such clinics, and by 1930
there were over 500. A great stimulus to the movement was given in
1921, when the Commonwealth Fund provided money for setting up a
large number of demonstration clinics in important cities throughout the
country. These guidance clinics have been of great value in curbing
mental disease and delinquency and in aiding educators in a more realistic
handling of problem children.

A hundred years ago very few persons thought of limiting the labor of
children. The parents were supposed to have full right to get as much
work out of children as possible. If they were employed outside of the
family, much the same notions held true. Beginning in 1842 public
authority began to be asserted in protecting children from industrial
exploitation. In that year the state of Massachusetts passed a law
limiting the work of children under twelve to ten hours daily. But the
movement for such protection developed very slowly and as late as
1938 only ten states adequately protected children from excessive hours
of labor. Federal child labor laws were set aside by the Supreme Court
in 1918 and 1922. An amendment to the federal constitution prohibiting
child labor has been before the country since 1924. Recent decisions of
the Supreme Court, such as United States vs. Darby (1941), indicate that
the present bench would uphold federal legislation outlawing child labor.

That much needs to be done still in protecting children from economic
exploitation is to be seen from the fact that in 1930 there were nearly
700,000 gainfully employed children under fifteen years of age. The
Wages-and-Hours Act of 1938 sharply restricted the labor of children in
industries engaged in interstate commerce, but there are still a large
number employed in intrastate industries.

In addition to negative or restraining activities on the part of the gov-
ernment in relation to the labor of young children the federal government
has in the last decade taken positive steps to provide employment or
support for unemployed youth old enough to be permitted to work. The
Civilian Conservation Corps has provided employment for over 2 million
and further assistance has been rendered by the National Youth Adminis-
tration.

A century ago orphaned and dependent children were taken care of
mainly in almshouses and through what is known as indentures, that is,
placing the children in families who agreed to support them in return
for their labor. Both of these types of caring for dependent children
were cruel and unsatisfactory. The almshouses made for demoraliza-
tion; indenture invited exploitation.

In the middle of the last century the Children's Aid Society of New
York began the important movement to take children out of almshouses
and put them in foster homes without the abuse of indenture. In 1868 the
Massachusetts Board of Charities introduced the practice of boarding out
children at public expense. It is generally agreed that carefully selected
foster homes are a better place for the dependent child than even very
good orphanages. However, the latter are an enormous improvement over

CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS 647

the old almshouses and their administration is constantly improving.
The census of dependent children in 1923 showed that out of the total of
about 400,000 such children, 204,000 were in institutions, 121,000 in their
own homes, 51,000 in free foster homes, and 22,000 in boarding homes.

Public care has been extended not only to dependent children but also to
neglected children. In 1875 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children was founded to protect neglected children in New York. Similar
societies sprang up in many other important cities. They brought cases
of cruelty and exploitation of children to the courts, helped to punish the
guilty, and made provisions for the welfare of the child. The progress
which has been made in protecting children from abuse can be seen from
the fact that in early days half the cases related directly to physical
cruelty. Today these cases usually do not amount to more than 10 per
cent of the total cases. In addition to protecting children from cruelty,
the care of neglected children extends to the support of such children, and
efforts to prevent them from falling into crime and vice.

In earlier days the family supplied most of the moral training and
discipline for children. But with the decline of the rural family and the
greater temptations of urban life, agencies had to be set up to keep chil-
dren out of crime. Here the most important agencies have been the Child
Guidance Clinics mentioned above and the clinics for juvenile delinquents
and juvenile courts. The leading figure in promoting this movement has
been Dr. William Healy. He established a juvenile psychopathic insti-
tute in connection with the juvenile court of Chicago in 1909. Later he
went to Boston and continued his good work with the Judge Baker
Foundation. This juvenile court movement under psychiatric guidance
has made considerable headway in the last two decades. Frederic M.
Thrasher and Clifford Shaw have aroused interest in preventing juvenile
delinquency through coping with the gang problem of youth and the
special dangers involved in rearing children in delinquency areas.

Formerly, the father and mother provided much of the education for
the child (guided by the motto that to spare the rod spoils the child).
Most of those who got any chance for an education received it in the
miserably equipped rural schools. Beginning back in the eighties of the
last century, G. Stanley Hall applied scientific psychological principles
to the education of children. An effort was made to free education from
the barbarous discipline of the traditional schools by John Dewey and
others through what has come to be known as experimental schools and
progressive education. Some kind of an education was made accessible
for all through the extension of free public instruction for children after
1837. The introduction of mental tests has enabled us to classify chil-
dren more effectively and to differentiate education in such a fashion as
to make it more satisfactorily adjusted to superior children, average
children, and retarded children. Vocational instruction is being provided
more adequately for the last group. City schools early showed great
improvement over the little red school house of the country. More re-
cently the development of consolidated and centralized schools has revo-

648 CONTEMPORARY FAMILY PROBLEMS

lutionized the quality of instruction and the educational opportunities in
rural schools.

Play, which used to be limited to the family groups, the neighborhood,
and the rural school, has now been developed as a major community and
national enterprise. Public recreational activities have developed on a
vast scale and supervised play has grown by leaps and bounds. In 1938
there were about 1,300 communities carrying on public recreation, spend-
ing about 60 million dollars therefor. Over a third of them were aided
by federal funds. Nevertheless, our recreational facilities for children
are still woefully inadequate. There are about 8 million urban children
who have little facility for play and few rural children have much oppor-
tunity for organized and supervised recreation. The consolidated rural
schools have done something to remedy this situation, but so far the sur-
face has only been scratched. There are certain organizations of youth
devoted to recreation and character building, such as the Boy and Girl
Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, Pioneer Youth, and the like.

Child welfare activities and organizations are numerous and extensive.
Various health agencies look after the physical and mental health of chil-
dren. Educators and social workers are concerned with seeing to it that
children get a decent education. Criminologists and psychiatrists en-
deavor to break up gangs and save children from crime. Recreation
organizers seek to provide a substitute for unhealthy forms of activity
which might lead to delinquency and degeneracy.

Among the various associations which give special attention to child
welfare are the Consumers League, the National Child Labor Commit-
tee, the Child Welfare League of America, the National Child Welfare
Association, and the American Child Health Association. There are also
various institutes of child welfare conducted by leading universities. The
Federal Children's Bureau is devoted to research and education in the
field of child welfare. Important national White House conferences on
child welfare met in 1909 and 1930.

The preceding pages indicate the remarkable development of social
organizations and agencies designed to supplement functions formerly
assumed by the family. Their growth has paralleled the loosening of
family ties and the decay of family responsibility on the heels of indus-
trialization and urbanization. There is no reason to believe that extra-
family activities and agencies will absorb all of the former social functions
of the family, but it is already apparent that they are extensively supple-
menting the family in the control of children. The desirable future
situation is better family control over those responsibilities which can best
be executed by the family and a more complete development of those
policies and agencies which are needed to supplement family activities in
our complex society.

CHAPTER XVI

The Disintegration of Primary Groups
and Community Disorganization

The Meaning of Community Life

AN ANALYSIS of community organization will be vague unless some
underlying sociological concepts are clarified, since all efforts to create a
new condition of social stability can succeed only after a thorough under-
standing of the causative factors involved in the decay of the former
primary institutions.

The frequent use of the term community in the past few decades does
not mean that a new basis for human association has been discovered.
Group life was characteristic of human society as soon as a sufficient
food supply for man and his herds would permit permanent settlement.
The struggle to exist made it necessary for primitive society to be formed
on tightly drawn lines. Kinship, based on blood ties, represented the
most intimate of associations, but this kinship grouping was also extended
to clans and tribes living in one area. The vital interest of making a
living was sufficient to unite the members of one local group and, so long
as the common interest remained, the group was cohesive. Primitive
society thus represented partly isolated groups of people dependent on
their own members. Unity of purpose was so necessary to the existence
of a group that, as Ross observes, "In the ancient village community,
every quarrel between individual members was treated as a community
affair, even the bitter words uttered during a quarrel being considered an
offense against the community. Every dispute was brought before
arbiters, or in the gravest cases, before the folk mote." * As population
increased, groups came in contact with others. The close bonds of
association were weakened by the entrance of new interests, and kinship
by blood ties was no longer the only social bond.

As the economic base of society broadened, associations along the lines
of caste and class were formed and, with the increasing complexity of life,
these associations were expanded. However broadened the contacts of
individuals may be in a complex society, one fundamental fact is to be
noted, namely, no individual can be independent of all others. All indi-
viduals are mutually dependent, and our whole "social order rests essen-

E. A. Ross, Principles of Sociology, Revised Ed., Applet on-Century, 1930, p. 385.

649

650 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY GROUPS

tially upon the interaction and interdependency of people." 2 In primi-
tive society this dependence was due to the need for cooperation in the
struggle for existence, and involved intimate relationships. In complex
modern society there still is interdependence because specialization and
division of labor have made it impossible for individuals to exist alone.
The combined efforts of all workers are needed to produce the goods
that will be used by individual members of the group, but the associations
have lost some of their intimate characteristics.

The word community has been loosely used to designate a group of
people having a unity of purpose, or to be more specific, a group of people
having the we-feeling and living in a common area. There have been so
many definitions of the term that it is well to give definite content to the
word. The rural sociologists have given the most painstaking thought
to the term and have settled on the idea that community represents the
smallest geographical unit that permits organized execution of the chief
human activities.3

One accepted approach which does not limit community to a small
social unit is recognition of a common purpose. This is a vague and
philosophical concept. The common purpose is the real aim of commu-
nity organization but it must be clearly defined. Stuart A. Queen gives
a practical definition when he thinks of community as being a group
which occupies a given territory and, through the exchange of service and
goods, may be regarded as a cooperating unit.4

Even this definition is none too good, because under modern conditions
no group of people can be self-supporting; nor do communities stay the
same in size. The more the mobility of the population increases, through
extended communication and transportation, the less usual it is for the
local community to supply the needs of the group. The automobile has
widened the scope of interest until rural people can shop in the city and
not be dependent on their own local group.

The Role of Primary Groups in Social Life

The local community is a primary group — one which emphasizes the
we-feeling. The concept of the primary group is so important to the
whole community organization movement that a reference to C. H.
Cooley's theory of the primary group is in order. The human infant is
helpless for the first few years. It is the family which cares for him, and
in the close circle he learns his first words and is taught the things he
should and should not do. In other words, the mores and customs of the
group are transmitted to him through the family. Therefore, by virtue
of being born helpless into a group, man from birth to death is dependent
on others. As the child grows older, he becomes part of a play or a small
neighborhood group. Further association and cooperation here adjusts

2 L. D. Osburn and M. H. Neumeyer, The Community and Society, American Book
Company, 1933, p. 81.

3 J. F. Steiner, Community Organization, Appleton-Century, 1930, p. 18.
* "What Is a Community?" Journal of Social Forces, Vol. I, pp. 375-382.

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 651

him to the institutional pattern. Cooley in his Social Organization calls
these intimate associations, or face-to-face relationships of man "the pri-
mary groups." 5

In these primary groups the person acquires all the attributes which we
think of as being human: that is, love, forebearance, sympathy, tolerance,
cooperation, respect for others, and in short, all that is "super-organic,"
to use Spencer's and Kroeber's term:

It is in a primary group that the child attains its first awareness of other
persons and subsequently acquires self-consciousness. Here the sense of belong-
ing and having a place and a role, which is the essence of personality, is first
derived ; and here, also, the child learns to talk and acquires its habits of obedience
and self-assertion, or their opposites, as well as its moral judgments. It is in
the family, the play group, the neighborhood, and other close relations, that the
standards and traditions of the larger society, as well as those typical of primary
groups are impressed most effectively.0

The primary group is characterized by "one-ness" of purpose and
sentiments of loyalty. This may also be said of groups that are not
permanent, such as the loyalty of the mob to party or leader and other
temporary groupings that have been formed in crises or temporary enthu-
siasms, but the term is used here to apply only to those groups which are
recognized as being permanent institutions.

Since the primary groups have played an outstanding role in the devel-
opment of the social process, they are vitally important in the socializa-
tion of the individual and the integrity and preservation of all our estab-
lished institutions. The economic and the social changes of the past 150
years have produced sweeping changes in our way of living and the
machine 'age, with its resultant transformations of life, has led to the
partial breakdown of these fundamental primary groups. This important
social problem has recently been analyzed with thoroughness by Ernest R.
Mowrer in his Disorganization: Personal and Social.

The Disintegration of Primary Groups

Family Deterioration. The family has been the primary institution
most resistant to social change, but the events of the past century have
brought about such revolutionary changes in its composition and trends
that some alarmists predict that the end of the family is near. We have
already discussed the changed conditions of women since the Industrial
Revolution and the growth of divorce. We shall here deal mainly with
symptoms of family instability as a phase of the decay of primary groups.
The large patriarchal family of olden times, with its close-knit cohesive-
ness and direct disciplinary influence on its members, has been replaced
by a small individualized family group — a shocking change to the more
conservative students of human relationships. Willistyne Goodsell
points to the complete disappearance of "the great family" from our

B C. H. Cooley, Social Organization, pp. 23 ff. See above, pp. 13 ff.
6E. T. Hiller, Principles of Sociology, Harper, 1933, p. 22.

652 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

modern picture.7 By this is meant the group of closely related persons
descended from the same grandfather or great-grandfather and residing
in the same community. "The pioneer spirit, the love of adventuresome
change of a pioneer people, has dispersed the old family stocks over the
face of the American continent." She continues by saying that, with the
dispersion of families, has come the decline, not only of unity and soli-
darity but also of even the honored meaning of the family: "Who in this
hurried individualistic age of self-aggrandisement and self-expressions,
holds up before youth the ideals and achievements of their ancestors, the
honored place they carved out in social and political life, as did the
Romans of old?"

The early American family represented the cohesive power of a primary
institution. It rested on three bases: First, there was the economic
and social importance of the home. Second, one notes the patriarchal
authority of the husband and father, given to him by custom and law.
Since public opinion and the conditions of life added to the force of law
for the male's authority, it is small wonder that divorces were relatively
unknown. Third, the dependence of all individuals on the united family
was a prime factor in family stability, for no individual had status unless
he was a member of a family group. Girls were expected to marry young
and raise large families and a spinster's usual lot in life was to take care
of the children of some more fortunate sister. Women, except in their
family function, were almost helpless. This point must be stressed be-
cause of its importance to the whole discussion of the current lessening of
family bonds. Women were subordinate to males in the domestic econ-
omy before the Industrial Revolution to the point where few women had
economic, occupational, or legal freedom. To summarize the social influ-
ence of the American family:

The American family was many things to its individual members. There was
not only its economic importance, but other institutional functions of the family
were at the same time strongly developed. It furnished protection to its mem*
bers, with less aid from the community than is expected today; it might even,
as in the case of feuds, carry on private wars. The authority of the father
and husband was sufficient to settle within the family many of the problems of
cbnduct. Religious instruction and ritual were a part of family life. For a suc-
cessful marriage it was considered important that couples should have the same
faith. In general, the home was the gathering place for play activities, though
there were some community festivities. Educationally, the farm and home duties
constituted a larger part of learning than did formal instruction in schools. Farm
life furnished what we now call manual training, physical education, domestic
science instruction and vocational guidance. The individual spent much of the
daily cycle in the family setting, occupied in ways set by the family pattern.8

Today an impressive number of forces are at work to reduce the sanc-
tity of the hearth fire to an interesting antique while the individual

* Goodsell, Problems of the Family, Appleton-Century, 1936, Revised Ed., p. 122.
8 J. H. S. Bossard, Social Change and Social Problems, Harper, 1938, p. 597, quoted
from W. F. Ogburn, Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, 1930, Vol. I, p. 662.

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 653

family members scatter to search congenial associates and new ways to
pass the time.

The divorce rate is one of the most convincing evidences of the break-
down of the patriarchal form of family life. All countries of the western
world and particularly the United States have had, as we have seen, an
alarming increase in the divorce rate in the past fifty years. The fre-
quency of divorce has increased by more than threefold since 1890. In
this year there were 53 divorces per 100,000 of the population, while
in 1935 there were 171. In the latter year there was one divorce to every
six marriages.9 Miss Goodsell further continues with the statistical evi-
dence by comparing the ratio of unbroken marriages to the population
in 1912 and 1932. In that interval the number of unbroken marriages
per thousand of the population fell from 9.57 to 6.59.10

J. P. Lichtenberger has shown how the increase in divorce rate, as early
as the period 1870-1905, far outstripped the rate of population increase.11
Analysis of the divorce statistics shows a steady increase in the number
of divorces granted as petitions by the wife, indicating a growing refusal
on the part of femininity to submit to situations which were once tolerated
because of the force of the folkways and mores. We can glean few im-
portant sociological truths from scanning the formal legal causes of
divorce. As has been observed, cruelty, one of the most frequent causes
listed in petitions for divorce, is a blanket term which may extend all
the way from lack of understanding to the actual infliction of physical
blows.

Other analyses that have been made by the U. S. Bureau of Census on
the salient features of divorces show that in 1932, 3.9% of divorces were
granted to couples whose marriage had lasted under one year and that,
of the total divorces, 35% were granted to persons whose marriages had
lasted less than five years. And then, again, the same year, 1932, shows
that 55% of all divorces were granted to couples who had no children.
In other words, the decreasing desire for children and, consequently, the
shrunken family makes the family influence decidedly less permanent.12

One more observation on divorce statistics is necessary for future refer-
ence. Available data show that the percentage of divorce in urban com-
munities outstrips the rate in rural districts. We shall deal with this in
detail later, but at this point, we can see that the social and economic
conditions of the city, with its hurry, competition, and nervous strain
coupled with the breakdown of moral standards and the indifference of
the public in the matter of the individual's affairs, have been largely re-
sponsible for the increase in divorce and the threatened disappearance of
American family life.13 First place in the reasons for divorce must be

°See above, pp. 622 ff.

10 Goodsell, op. cit., p. 123.

11 Divorce: A Social Interpretation, p. 143.

12 Goodsell, op. cit., p. 394 ff.

13 See Ernest Groves and W. F. Ogburn, American Marriage and Family Rela-
tionship, Holt, 1928, p. 356.

654 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

assigned to the rapid urbanization of modern life, recent economic changes
and the growing economic independence of woman, sexual ignorance and
incompatibility on the part of the husband, wife, or both, and the current
ease of contracting marriage.14

Added to the foregoing statistical evidence of the broken marital
ties may be mentioned desertion. Though desertion has often been
described as "the poor man's divorce," some students insist that it would
be more correct to speak of desertion as the "poor man's vacation/' since
the deserting man does not as a rule consider his absences from home as
anything so final and definite as divorce.15

Social workers give us our best information concerning the large num-
ber of men who, finding the economic burden at home too heavy, shake it
off on the shoulders of welfare agencies and depart. Desertions have be-
come more numerous since the depression days of 1929, as governmental
agencies have marshaled their forces to take over the responsibilities of
the individual heads of families. Some recent commentators have called
attention to the increasing proportion of cases where the wife and mother
deserts the family. This is probably a result of the newer freedom of
women and the recent expansion of the occupational opportunities.

Laws passed to bring the erring husband back to compel his support
of his wife and children have been of little effect. With no job, there
can be no support, or if he is fortunate enough to secure a job, he may
refuse to support his family. The only alternative is a jail sentence
which removes both job and husband and places the family back on
relief.

The weakened influence of the primary relationship may be seen fur-
ther in the increase of juvenile delinquency. More than 200,000 children
each year pass through our juvenile courts, representing 1% of children
of juvenile court age.16

The breakdown of the family may be further traced to the economic
changes following the Industrial Revolution. The center of production
shifted from the home, which ceased to be of primary economic impor-
tance. The change went further than that. The growing of foodstuffs,
canning, breadmaking, the fashioning of clothing, the concocting of home
medicines — all of the cooperative enterprises which made for family self-
sufficiency and the resulting cohesion — were removed from the family.
Electricity for home use has made possible thousands of labor-saving
devices that provide more leisure.

The urban impact, which is responsible for the change in size of homes,
will be considered in detail later. The employment of women outside
the home, as a logical result of the reduced economic role of women within
the home and because of the increased cost of living, will be discussed
later and need only be mentioned in this connection as a reason why the

14 Cf. Lichtenberger, Divorce, Part II.

15 Bossard, Social Change and Social Problems, p. 629, cited from Joanna Colcord,
Broken Homes, Russell Sage Foundation, 1919, p. 7.

16 Bossard, op. cit., p. 663, quoted from Joanna Colcord, op. cit.t p. 7,

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 655

home has lost in cohesiveness and influence. To cite Bossard, the social
cohesion of the earlier form of family, cemented by joint participation in
community enterprises is passing: "As a result its individual members
have been liberated to pursue first, his or her own work and subsequently
and increasingly, other aspects of their individual lives." 1T In summary,
"the members of the family are torn asunder by different tasks, interests,
contacts, and circles of friends. So far as the family holds the loyalty of
its members, it does so in spite of their diversity of work." 18 In other
words, the home of today is maintained not as a necessity but because
we have found no other substitute for women as mothers, and no other
place where, "we may act like we feel and when we feel like it." But the
influence of the family as a basic social unit is fading away.

Breakdown of the Neighborhood. The second of the primary relation-
ships that have been weakened as a result of the changes of the past 150
years is that of the neighborhood. The decay of the neighborhood has
been closely associated with the increasing importance of city life. In
the city, "identity of interests and a concern for the conditions of the
neighborhood, except as they clearly affect personal, economic, and social
affairs, tend to disappear. Modern methods of communication and trans-
portation make possible a wide psycho-social and territorial range. The
person's activities are not necessarily located in his home community nor
are the participants of these activities, his neighbors. Locus becomes
significant as a place of retirement from the varied stimuli of social
activity, and neighboring tends to be redefined as unwarranted interest." 19

The neighborhood spirit of a small isolated group was only an exten-
sion of the intimate characteristics of family association. A real neigh-
bor was concerned with the affairs of others. Helping hands were given
in time of trouble and distress. A family joy over the birth of a new
baby, an engagement, wedding, or some good luck, was a signal for neigh-
borhood rejoicing. Farmers exchanged work during harvest time. In
a typical rural community where the wheat was ripe and ready for thresh-
ing, the news went forth to all the farmers and their wives for miles
around, who gathered to help with the threshing. Wagons and teams
of the neighborhood were all at the disposal of the threshing farmers.
All hands went to work with a will. The threshing scene was one of
frenzied, cheerful activity. Wagons hauling water plied back and forth,
small boys of all ages and sizes darted around getting in the way but
helping in their own fashion. On a single farm, there might be 25 or 30
farmers with as many teams all engaged in threshing, sacking, and loading
grain, and stacking straw and carrying it to the barns.

But it was at noon time that the real community spirit was most
evident. Since early morning the women of the neighborhood had been
on hand to prepare the food for the noon day meal. They had come

™ Op. cit., p. 600.

18 E. A. Ross, op. cit., p. 606.

19 Bessie A. McClenahan, The Changing Urban Neighborhood, Univ. of California,
Studies # 1, 1930, quoted from E, A, Ross, Principles of Sociology, p. U5,

656 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

armed with pans, kettles, tableclothes, and provisions. The tables were
set on trestles under the trees and it was the job of the small girls to wave
green branches to keep the flies away from the crowd, who gathered hot
and goodnatured for the noon meal. Each farm woman vied with the
others to supply a good meal for the threshers. The choicest of vege-
tables, jellies and preserves were opened; dozens of frying chickens and
stacks of pies and cakes were absolute necessities for the threshing dinner.
The work was cheerfully done, but the helpers expected a good meal and
one thresher's helper was heard to remark, "I ain't never going to help
there agin. The apple pie was so tough you couldn't cut it and there
warn't enough sweetening in it for a cup of coffee." During the threshing
season these gatherings were repeated until all the neighborhood wheat
was in the barn or at the mill.

The coming of the mechanized machinery made it unnecessary for the
neighborhood to cooperate in the threshing on each farm and put an end
to this particular expression of neighborliness. One by one, the other
neighborhood bonds have been loosened. Quilting parties, ice cream so-
cials, the camp meeting, the corn bee — all have been made unnecessary in
the farmer's life by the automobile and the radio and the other numerous
mechanizations. Some remnants of neighborliness may still be found in
the more remote communities, where modern interests and smooth high-
ways have not as yet penetrated so completely. The stronger the urban
and mechanical influence, the more complete the disappearance of the
primary influence of neighborhood. In the place of the neighborhood, we
find small interest-groups which have only the localized interests of their
occupations or recreations to hold them together.

The community neighborliness, with its concern with the affairs of all,
has been criticized because of its insistence on the observance of a rigid
code of behavior. The nonconformist who refused to hold to this code
found himself quickly ostracized. It was because of the old type neigh-
borhood and its one-ness of mind on moral codes that the divorce rate
in the United States remained low until urbanization occurred. No
woman dared incur the disapproval of the community by divorcing her
husband, even if she had ample justification for doing so. The home
was a sacred institution and the neighborhood saw to it that the family,
to all outward appearances, remained intact. The efforts of the past
20 years to revive the old neighborhood spirit by clubs, poultry associa-
tions, home-makers clubs, farm clubs, and other substitutes for the
primary group are the surest proof that the influence of the primary group
was a strong force for the good of the community.

The Decay of the Rural Play Group. As is to be expected, with the
decline of the neighborhood the traditional play group was doomed. The
old rural play group has been wiped out even more thoroughly than the
rural family, which still continues to exist, though with much less co-
hesiveness than formerly. The rural play group was made up of the
boys and girls in one family or in several neighboring families, or of those
who attended the local district school. Theirs represented a simple and

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 657

direct type of games and recreation, in which all participated on a rela-
tively equal plane. This play group not only supplied most of the
recreation enjoyed by rural youngsters but also exercised a remarkable
socializing influence. The games tended to inculcate a spirit of fair play,
of healthy competition, and of well-earned exultation.

The simple rural play group has now all but disappeared. There are
fewer children in both the family and the rural neighborhood. A smaller
number of children attend district schools where those still persist. How-
ever, there has been a marked tendency in the more progressive states to
do away with district schools altogether and send the children to new and
improved centralized schools. In the centralized schools there is super-
vised play and better playground equipment and athletic paraphernalia.
But the small play group has disintegrated. In the prescribed classroom
gymnastics there is little element of play. In much of the real play most
of the pupils are merely spectators who look on while the members of two
ball teams, for example, contest their skill. Moreover, many neighbor-
hoods are brought together in these centralized playgrounds and different
cultures intermingle. Most of the children are originally strangers to
each other. There remains little of the old psychic unity and spontaneity
which prevailed in the small rural playground associations.20

The desire for play is not only neglected but often suppressed in the
city. Space is at a premium and the dangers of playing on crowded city
streets are all too much in evidence. Accordingly, youngsters are prone
to gather on the street corners and get into mischief in their leisure hours,
It was not until late in the nineteenth century that the socializing value of
play was realized and the Play Movement proper really began.21

This breakdown of the primary relationships — the family, the neigh-
borhood, and the rural play group — thus began with urbanization and
the mechanization of life. Since urbanization is the chief cause of the
disappearance, in our modern life, of the relationships which make for
fundamental stability and which have been, as Cooley says, "the cradle
of human nature," let us further examine the effects of this urban impact.

The Impact of Urban Life on Social Institutions

The power of the city to disrupt all former social organization is largely
inherent in the causes of city growth. Any sound interpretation of the
city will recognize the Industrial Revolution and its counterpart — the
Agrarian Revolutions — as causal facts.

The mechanical devices of the nineteenth century substituted machines
for hand work and differentiated manufacturing from agriculture, thereby
producing a cleavage which has influenced all social institutions. The
cultural lag which exists today in our social institutions is a result of the
failure of man's institutions to keep pace with his material progress. The

20 Cf., J. F. Steiner, America at Play, McGraw-Hill, 1933.

21 See below, pp. 831 ff.

658 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

factory system made necessary concentration of man power and, con-
sequently, the unprecedented growth of urban population. However,
concentration of population would have been impossible without improve-
ments in communication and transportation, and without the agricultural
revolution to furnish food and raw materials for the workers in the city
factories. In other words, it would not be inaccurate to say that ma-
chines and factories made the industrial city necessary, while improved
agriculture, transportation and trade have made it possible for large
cities to exist with unparalleled frequency.22

The agricultural improvements made it possible to grow a larger
amount of food than ever before. As farming became more efficient,
fewer hands were needed and young men and women might go to seek
employment in the cities. This shift began before 1914, and for 20 years
thereafter there was a steady decline in the number of those engaged in
agriculture.

It was not only an economic change that aided the growth of the city.
Thut the cause of the city's growth was basically economic, there is no
doubt, but the psychological and cultural lure of the city .is one of the
most important reasons for a steady migration. The city has been
called "a state of mind." It is the place where life moves swiftly, with
kaleidoscopic changes, exciting hazards, the lure of large rewards — offer-
ing a glamorous change to the monotony that characterized rural life be-
fore the coming of the automobile and the hard-surfaced road, and the
radio. It was youth that was particularly dazzled by the city. Here
ambition could have full scope; the desire for self-expression and recog-
nition— in fact, all the fundamental desires of the individual, it seemed
— might be realized in the city. Here competition is at its keenest, offer-
ing a challenge to those with energy. Rural life soon came to carry a
stigma of the "hay-seed" and the "country bumpkin." It was only in
the city that life might be lived to its fullest. The lag in rural culture
has also been a cause of rural migration. Education, recreation, better
conveniences, better churches are among the varied causes of cityward
migration.

While all social types are thrown together within the urban community,
social differentiations and barriers are found as great as those existing in
feudal society. In the city, persons live massed together within close
proximity, yet find themselves separated by a "social distance" such as
exists nowhere else:

In the village and the open country, where there are few distinctions based
on social or economic status, the social distance between persons is usually not
pronounced except perhaps in cases of significant racial or cultural differences.
But in the city with its varied cultures, its multiplicity of behaviour patterns, its
racial barriers and class distinctions, its extremes of poverty and wealth, social
distance has widened even though spatial distance has narrowed.23

22 C/., W. S. Thompson, Population Problems, McGraw-Hill, 1930, Chap. XVI.

23 N. P. Gist and L. A. Halbert, Urban Society, Crowell, 1935, p. 266.

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 659

The impersonal relationships of the city have been cited as the cause
of many of the major social problems prevailing in the family, industry,
and education. But impersonal relations are inherent in the city itself.
It is impossible to continue in urban life the intimate personal relation-
ships of the small community. Diversified national groups, with different
cultural patterns, mobility of groups, and congestion have all definitely
prevented the extension of the spirit of neighborliness in the city, as in the
local community:

As Burgess has put it, mobility becomes "the pulse of the community" the best
index of the state of metabolism of the city. Always does the rate of mobility
affect social relationships within the community. Excessive mobility "with its
increase in the number and intensity of stimulations, tends inevitably to confuse
and to demoralize the person." It is conducive, in its extreme forms, to patho-
logical behaviour and social disorganization; it hinders the functioning of the
traditional forms of social control; it is disastrous to the development of com-
munity consciousness ; it frequently means the pulverization of social relationship
with the concomitant individualizations of behaviour patterns. In a word, it is
inextricably linked with the social problems of the city, and the urban area that
present these problems in an aggravated form are invariably areas of excessive
mobility. But in its modified forms mobility means growth, integration, intellec-
tual development. It is for this reason that mobility in the city may be either
normal or pathological ; may mean either integration or disintegration, depending
on the number and kind of psychic stimulations and the state of mutability of
the person who responds to these stimulations.24

The entire social basis of urban life is, of necessity, based primarily on
a money economy. Life must be based on superficial social relationships,
for there is neither time nor opportunity for intimate personal acquaint-
ance. The city stereotype has been formed around the idea of not what
the individual is, but what he can show. Accordingly, persons are placed
in definite categories according to the role they play in the city — as
intellectual, agitator, banker, society woman, man about town, and so
on.25

But it is an impulse of human nature to wish to associate and, although
primary groups have been broken down, especially in cities, many func-
tional groups, service clubs, and fraternal organizations have arisen to
satisfy, so far as possible, the desire for intimate social contact. The
altruistic impulses and social consciousness which formerly functioned
within the neighborhood structure of agrarian society now find their
outlet in various urban organizations designed to promote some form of
social uplift. In New York City alone there are over twelve hundred of
these organizations which aim to serve others without remuneration. As
the home has become less important in city civilization, these functional
groups and civil centers have gained in relative influence. We have such
functional organizations as chambers of commerce, labor union centrals,
and the like. Service clubs of numerous types abound, and fraternal

., op. cit.,p. 269.

25 See Nels Anderson and E. C. Lindeman, Urban Sociology, Knopf, 1928,
Chap. XII, for further characterization of these types.

660 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

organizations tend to thrive as a mode of providing social contacts for
urban dwellers.26

Occupations in the city are many and varied, and the activities in-
volved in earning a living are sufficient to condition individuals to the
point where habits are formed that color their thoughts, their reactions,
and their leisure time:

It is more than a myth that the preacher, the teacher, the salesman, the poli-
tician, the farmer, and the entrepreneur conform to a type. Each reveals a
mental slant having its genesis in the task of earning a livelihood. Since the
prevailing occupation in the rural community is agriculture, it is not difficult to
sec where the diverse interests of the city dweller have led to a diversity of ideas
which make community spirit difficult to form.27

Gist and Halbert properly emphasize the fact that it is difficult to
develop a vigorous and unified community sentiment under such cir-
cumstances:

It is obvious that with such diversity of social status, economic interest and
cultural background, it is extremely difficult to bring about any community
of interest or unity of attitude in urban public affairs. In rural communities,
those who associated in schools, business, and the like, were drawn from a common
cultural heritage, which their association perpetuated. In our cities, the popu-
lation is either drawn from different parts of the same countries or from many
different countries, or drawn from both. All have different types of mores,
traditions and social habits. There is no continuity of tradition to perpetuate,
or any common community standards to conform and apply.28

The competitive basis on which a money economy is planned is inimical
to the spirit of neighborliness. The struggle in the city is one to reach
a goal. With some, it is to pay the rent, light bills, and grocery bills;
with others, it is to scale the social ladder of success. The average city
person develops an attitude of aggressiveness and self-assertion as a pro-
tective device to keep him from being imposed on by others and to -main-
tain his "rights." The result of this aggressiveness and forced impersonal
attitude is to widen further the gulf or social distance between city
dwellers. This makes the organization of a benevolent or community
spirit difficult.

• When we speak of "the family," we usually mean the traditional rural
family, composed of parents, a large number of children, and a fixed abode.
These units rested on a definite social and economic foundation. A father
and husband were necessary to furnish a living and to be the head of the
family. Women accepted their role as mothers and their dependence on
their husbands. Children were an asset economically and were, there-
fore, welcome. These fundamental bases of the family have been de-
stroyed by the city.

No longer is the family the economic, educational, protective, recrea-
tional, and affectional unit. Recreation and education, in large part,
have gone from the home. The city family has become a consuming, not

26 Cf., Anderson and Lindeman, op. cit., Part III.

27 Gist and Halbert, op. cit., p. 314.
**Ibid.,p. 315.

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 661

a producing agency. The shifting of productive and recreational
interest outside the home has reduced the dependence of the members on
each other and has weakened the bond which held the family together in
a cohesive social unit. The father is becoming less important as a neces-
sary wage earner. The emancipation of women and their entrance into
industry has made urban women unwilling to assume the responsibilities
that the rural mother did in raising a large family. The day nursery,
maintained by relief agencies, churches, and benevolent societies as a
place for working women to leave their children, has become a part of the
city pattern. It represents an attempt to substitute for a mother's care.
In short, children in the city have become a definite economic liability.
Since few city dwellers can afford a home of even moderate size, they
must be content with apartments or flats. Those of the poorer classes
who have children urge them to find employment as soon as they are old
enough, while the children of the well-to-do are turned over to maids or
nurses or sent away to boarding-schools. There are too many distrac-
tions in the city and people are too busy to permit, even when apartments
are large enough, the impromptu gatherings of the family and friends
which provide the chief recreation of the rural family. To visit a friend
in the city without first telephoning is considered a breach of good man-
ners.

Individualism in the family is thus intensified by both the economic
and the social pattern set by the city. This individualism is, in part,
responsible for the changing attitude toward marriage. With woman's
entrance into industry and her new legal freedom, plus the loss of the
economic and social necessity of the home as a production unit, the atti-
tude toward divorce has undergone a change. As we have seen, in the
old rural community the attitude of the neighborhood was all important.
To the neighborhood, a stable and well-integrated family was of vital
importance. The wife who attempted or even desired to break her mar-
riage ties or failed in her duty to her husband or her children was an
object of public scorn. So powerful was the conventional code of the
neighborhood that few women dared to brave its thundering disapproval.

In the modern city, however, the neighborhood spirit and censorship
has all but disappeared. No longer is the neighborhood concerned with
the individual families. Life is so intense, so hurried, the pull up the
social and economic ladder is so urgent and time so short that there is
little energy left to concern oneself with the affairs of the neighbors. The
rate of mobility is such that scenes and social settings are constantly shift-
ing. The neighborhood consciousness of its duty as the social mentor is
naturally weakened. Only when the neighborhood remains a stable, un-
changing unit is it a power in the shaping and molding of tradition.

The breakdown of the family, as a result of the urban impact, and the
disappearance of the neighborhood have produced community disorgani-
zation and demoralization. The high rate of divorce and the large num-
ber of desertions are direct results of this breakdown. Juvenile court
judges in our cities and investigators of crime assign a large proportion of

662 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

the blame for increased juvenile delinquency to the defective training of
the young by parents. With the increase in individualization and of
working parents, the children receive little of the disciplinary training of
former days. This lack of training, accompanied by a lack of respect for
parents and social obligations, makes them easy converts to anti-social
practices. Unless they have a congenial home to play in, to live in, and
something with which to occupy their leisure time, they are likely to drift
into anti-social behavior from association with the gang on the street
corners. Our reformatories and our penitentiaries arc evidences of the
lack of provision for the youth of our cities.

The disintegration of the urban family has been the result of its in-
ability to adjust itself to the rapidly changing material world. Where
there is a lag between an institutional pattern and social reality, disorgan-
ization will result. The family is in a period of transition and, while still
monogamic in form, it is in confusion and chaos, as a result of the break-
down of the primary contacts so necessary to its cohesiveness.

How the Impact of City Life on the Country Has
Affected Rural Life Patterns

We mentioned in an earlier section the Agrarian Revolution and its
effect on the growth of the modern city. The farm and rural life once
occupied a dominant place in society. The chief social institutions of
modern times have been deeply influenced by rural life. When we talk
of the family in a sociological sense we still mean essentially the rural
family. Contemporary discussion of the weakening or downfall of the
family refers, in reality, to changes in what has been the traditional rural
kinship group. The rural population has provided the major support of
the Christian church, especially of the Protestant church. The latter was
the center of social life in the rural community. Country dwellers long
remained immune to the discoveries in scholarship which undermined
traditional views of the Bible and religion. Hence they have been a
bulwark of Christian orthodoxy.29

In the last half-century, more and more of the rural population has
been drawn to our urban centers. But improvements in communication
and transportation have tended to urbanize the remaining rural elements.
On the farm, machinery has supplanted, to a great extent, the need of
hand labor. Therefore, fewer children are needed and the farm family of
today, while larger than the urban family, has also felt the urban influ-
ence. Women are less dependent on men today. They can leave for the
city, get jobs, and support themselves better than most farm wives and
mothers. Then, too, country women are no longer needed in the same way
as they were in the old rural family, where most of the production was in
the home and women's labor was sorely needed. Divorce, while still not

2* C/., H. B. Hawthorn, The Sociology of Rural Life, Century, 1926, Chaps. I-III,

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY GROUPS 663

so common in rural areas as in cities, is beginning to be accepted to the
extent that a divorcee is not considered a pariah.

The automobile has brought changes in life that have taken recreation
from the rural home and placed it on an urban basis. Young folks can
now drive into cities or small towns and go to the movies or a dance, and
the community sing or husking-bee has lost most of its former lure. The
radio brings the latest in news, music, drama and programs of every
variety to the farm living-room. Up-to-date farm journals and metro-
politan dailies bring the farmer in close contact with the city. The
women no longer have to depend on Sears-Roebuck or Montgomery Ward
catalogs for their glimpse into city fashions, but can go shopping to
near-by cities by automobile, listen to the fashion hints over the radio,
or get a breathless presentation from the newest moving picture.

The rural church, once a center of social life, has suffered severely from
this urbanization. Revivals and Sunday services in the old days pro-
vided a meeting-place for the exchange of bits of gossip, and the swapping
of ideas on the weather, crops, or politics. Many a romance was begun
on the way home from a church meeting. Poor young preachers advocat-
ing cither the Fundamentalist doctrine of fire and brimstone or Modernist
social ideals are hardly able to distract the younger generation from the
secular attractions of the city.

The rural neighborhood is disappearing rapidly. Mechanization of
labor has made socialibility and mutual aid unnecessary. There is less
need for cooperative help when the days of the tractor-combine have
come. The rural community attempts to form clubs and cliques in
imitation of city ways. The prevailing rural attitude is that of aping the
city, and, as a result, the community has lost its cohesiveness and social
unity, since it no longer lives with and for itself.

Rural education, which was formerly limited to what the district school
could give, has been transformed. There are better buildings on a con-
solidated school plan, better trained teachers, who draw larger salaries and
have the use of modern equipment. Buses carry the children to and
from school ; and no longer do farmers feel that it is necessary to keep their
children home from school for needed labor or because it is too far for
them to walk or go on horseback. The practical side of education is
beginning to be stressed. Manual training courses in farm-husbandry
and domestic science are coming to be a part of the rural curriculum.

The rural press has also undergone a remarkable transformation. The
old country newspaper with its week-old national news and provincial
outlook has been replaced by the up-to-date metropolitan daily. Good
roads have made excellent rural news coverage possible. Farm journals
are now of superior quality carrying the latest information concerning
crops, livestock, and new methods of agriculture.

The radio is everywhere and, more than any one other single item, it
has been responsible for the "urbanization" of country life. Amos and
Andy, Rudy Vallee, Easy Aces, and the like, are as well known to the
rural dweller as to his city neighbor. The cultural side of the radio has

664 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

made possible the familiarization of the farm family with the best — as
well as the worst — in music.

The provincial attitude of the typical rural family, then, is being broken
down by the same agencies that have made for the shallow superficiality
of the city. The new rural personality stereotype is not clearly defined as
is the urban personality type, because the urbanizing influences have not
been operating so long or deeply on the rural life pattern, but their effects
are clearly seen already. Some of the best of our rural youth have mi-
grated to the city. Many of the superior men and women in American
cities have had rural backgrounds. This means that the rural community
now finds a paucity of leaders. The mentality of the average young man
and woman in the rural community has been compared to that of a
second-generation immigrant. They are in a disorganized state, pulled
between two conflicting cultures.

We see, then, that the old rural strongholds — the home, the neighbor-
hoods and the play group — have been undermined as a result of
mechanization both in industry and agriculture. The farm family still
exists and is a more stable unit than the urban family, but many of its
former functions of discipline, domestic economy, recreation, and affec-
tion have been weakened and it has lost most of its cohesiveness as a
stabilizing unit. The neighborhood, as a socializing agency, has been
broken down by the automobile, good roads, mechanization, and the
radio. These same forces have dissipated the play groups of the rural
community, since there is less desire to play ball on the corner lot if a
gangster movie is showing at the village or in the town 10 miles down the
road. Therefore, the impact of urbanism has been sufficiently strong to
undermine the primary institutions of both country and city.

It is a well-known truism that when one thing is removed and a gap
left, there will be a replacement of some kind to fill up the vacuum. This
is true in natural science. The principle also applies in the social sci-
ences. Invasion and succession, according to Gist and Halbert, have
their counterparts in human society:

In a social organization where there is a relatively high rate of mobility and
where competition is not only economic but cultural as well, groups of varying
economic and cultural levels tend to displace each other, to change their
ecological position as a result of the competitive process.80

Community Organization Supplants Primary Groups

Community organization has moved in to substitute for the gap left in
the breakdown of the primary institutions. C. E. Rainwater, in discuss-
ing the rise of the play movement in the United States, says that the
nineteenth century saw the complete deterioration of the neighborhood,
but the twentieth is to see its reconstruction. It is through the medium
of the organization of community forces in all phases that this recon-

80 Gist and Halbcrt, op. cit., p. 167.

DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS 665

struction is to be accomplished.81 Most of the processes of urbanization
have been hostile to such a reconstruction of community life. High
population density, low rate of permanent residence, and the mixed na-
tional and cultural groups have all made for secondary groups and
relationships which break down the primary units and are inimical to
their rebuilding.

The extension of community organization into the field of the primary
relationships has come about as a result of the gradual growth of group
consciousness. As soon as the Industrial Revolution made changes in
industry that concentrated a large number of workers in one place and
produced division of labor and mass production, the role of the individual
was minimized, because, in the world of machinery, no isolated individual
could maintain himself successfully. This is the reason for the rise of
corporations, syndicates, and mergers in the business world. In other
words, the Industrial Revolution drove the first wedge into the fortress
of the primary institutions but at the same time furnished a new tech-
nique to provide a substitute process.

The growing trend toward group solidarity is to be seen in the entrance
of the government into what have hitherto been private affairs. Social
legislation has advanced in a remarkable fashion to cover fields of ac-
tivity that heretofore would have been considered a violation by govern-
ment of the inalienable rights of an individual. Laws relating to
housing, tenant regulation and supervision, child labor, child welfare,
municipal parks, playgrounds and other public welfare measures are
examples of the recognition of the new approach to the field of group
responsibility.

The significance of the group approach in community life may be seen
from the attitude assumed by education. Education is no longer a purely
individual matter. It is now conceived to be a community responsibility
for definite standards to be upheld so that education for the masses can
be made effective. The modern emphasis is on fitting the child into the
community rather than mere training of the individual. Vocational
guidance, manual training, domestic science, and the social studies are
examples of this group approach. The force of the group in the commu-
nity is nowhere better demonstrated than in the field of public welfare.
Unless the entire community functions fairly well as a group in the
matter of alleviating poverty or righting maladjustments, the entire pro-
gram is doomed and the community as a whole suffers.

The group approach to the whole field of social work is a new em-
phasis. Gone is the old idea that the individual is wholly responsible
if he fails to make a living or if he drifts into anti-social conduct. The
new theory is that society, in its malfunctioning, is partly responsible.
Social agencies have employed this philosophy in their approach to the
giving of aid. A complete picture of the personal background, environ-

81 The Play Movement in the United States, University of Chicago Press, 1922,
p. 522.

666 DISINTEGRATION OF PRIMARY CROUPS

ment, employment, friends, clubs, lodges, and use of leisure time is ob-
tained before any help is given. In other words, the individual is placed
against his group or community picture rather than viewed as an
entity. The application of group responsibility may be seen in the field
of crime and juvenile delinquency. The entire procedure of the juvenile
court revolves around placing the child in the right sort of group relation-
ships,32

All these community activities need not imply that the idea is now
prevalent that the individual has no responsibility for his actions. They
simply mean that there is a growing realization that the environment
exercises a definite effect on the individual. Illness, unemployment, and
delinquent conduct are no longer considered as unrelated factors in the
individual's life, but are to be regarded as group or community problems,
as well. So long as men lived under a system of domestic economy where
each family or gild was a separate unity and not dependent on other
units, or so long as the welfare of the whole was not at stake, group ac-
tions on social matters were all but unheard of. But as soon as modern
industry produced a situation of fine balance between all social units,
it was to the interest of the whole that the welfare of individuals be made
a concern of the group. People living in cities have found it to their
advantage to combine their mutual strength and assets and work to-
gether on some common needs. Community of interest is found in the
provisions made to protect the group from fire and theft through the fire
and police departments. Municipally owned public utilities are a rec-
ognition of this group approach. In other words, concentration of
population, changes of economy, and the rise of cities made the group
approach to social problems necessary.

The existence of the social worker offers the best evidence of the
substitution of community emphasis for primary relationships. So long
as men lived in small groups and moved in more or less isolated units,
the spirit of mutual aid and neighborliness operated. There was less need
for formal organization to aid distress. But with the growing detach-
ment of individuals from their primary groups, the neighborhoods and
the family, came the need for group social work.

' The creed of the social worker, working in the new community perspec-
tive, is to be found in the philosophy of Karl de Schweinitz, in his Art
of Helping People Out of Trouble: 88 that all persons have one problem
in life — adjustment to environment. This problem is solved only if a
working relationship and correlation are achieved between the things that
are the self of the individual, and the experiences, opportunities, and
material elements, which are the environment. It is then the job of the
social worker to make it possible for the individual to integrate his per-
sonality, so that he will be able to fit naturally into his social environ-
ment. This also means that the social workers must understand the com-
munity and its possibilities, in order to be of service to those who are
dependent upon them for adjustment to the new life-patterns.

32 Steiner, Community Organization, p. 8.
33Houghton Miffllin, 1924.

PART VI
Institutions Promoting Richer Living

CHAPTER XVII
The Contemporary Crisis in Religion and Morals

Some Phases of the Development of Religion

The Nature and Social Importance of Religion. Before proceeding to
discuss the origins of religion, we should submit at least a few preliminary
definitions. We must not accept the various modern sophisticated atti-
tudes toward religion as an interpretation of what religion has meant
down the ages. Who, for example, could have any quarrel with religion,
when viewed as Edward Scribner Ames defines it in his Religion (1929),
namely, as th& search for, and realization of, the highest conceivable
social values? If one identifies religion with all social decency and
justice, one creates a conception of religion that is necessarily highly
attractive. But such a definition is not accurate as a historical picture
of the nature and practices of religion, nor is it a reliable description of
organized religion, even today.

Whatever religion may become in the future, it has always embraced,
in the past, man's interpretation of the nature of the hypothetical super-
natural world. It includes the resulting efforts man has made to avail
himself of the supposedly beneficent intervention of the friendly super-
natural powers and to ward off the assumed malevolent influences of evil
supernatural beings. In other words, religion has, thus far, been man's
effort to adjust himself to the supernatural world in such a manner as to
secure the maximum benefits and the minimum disasters therefrom.

Religion has also exerted a tremendous influence upon other institu-
tions. Religion and morals have always been closely intertwined. In-
deed, morals have, so far, literally been applied religion. Moral conduct
has been designed to please the gods rather than to serve man directly
and efficiently. For many thousands of years religion exerted a large
influence over economic life. Man believed that he had to placate the
gods to be successful in his economic efforts. The gods were supposed
to provide good hunting and fishing grounds, to increase the supply of
fish and game, to insure fertility for vegetation and animals, and to ward
off evil spirits which might do harm to flocks and crops. Economic
institutions and practices were believed to be revealed and favored by
the gods. Religious dogmas have stimulated and controlled economic
activities and systems from primitive times to our own. Property has
often been believed to have divine sanction, and attempts to control it in
the interest of society have been branded as wijpked and sinful.

Politics and government were long based upon religion. The priest-

669

670 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

hood blessed and approved existing forms of government. Early kings
were regarded as ruling through the will of gods. They were themselves
regarded as semi-divine. In the Middle Ages, the Church sought to
control government in matters relating to religion and morals. Even in
early modern times, absolute monarchs asserted that they ruled by
divine right. In our own day, we confer a sort of divine sanction upon
our constitutions. Divine blessing is still invoked in behalf of our gov-
ernmental agents. Revolution, political radicalism, and social change
have usually been cursed by the custodians of religion.

For many thousands of years, education was little more than the
transmission of religious beliefs and sacred usages under priestly auspices.
In pagan times, the priesthood exerted a considerable influence over many
phases of education. During the Middle Ages education was primarily
in the hands of the Church. Even in our day, there are a great many
church schools, and religious education is still a prominent item in
modern instruction. Art originated as a phase of religious mythology,
and until recent times art was used primarily to glorify the gods, to
teach religious lessons, and to portray religious figures and scenes.
Ecclesiastical structures have always constituted an important element
in architecture. Our conception of the gods and important religious
personages have grown primarily out of their portrayal in art. Early
literature was chiefly religious. The most widely-read books of all
history have been the sacred literature of the great religious systems.
Even much of secular literature has revolved around religious themes.
Religion has given color to all of the great stages of cultural evolution.

The Potency of Religion. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the
extensive role that religion played in the life of primitive man. His
conception of the universe rested almost entirely upon the assumption
of supernatural forces and powers. To him, knowledge and religion
were almost identical. Few of the important daily activities, whether
economic or recreational, were carried on except under proper religious
auspices. Primitive industry was almost literally applied religion. For
instance, among the primitive Todas in India today, religion centers
Ground their herds of buffalo and dairy activities. Their whole dairy
industry is controlled by religion and magical rites.

Much time and effort were devoted by primitive men and early historic
peoples to propitiating the gods associated with agriculture and industry.
For example, early Roman agriculture became a round of religious rituals;
there were forty-five holy days each year devoted to placating or venerat-
ing agrarian deities. Among the Jews, Yahweh was originally a pastoral
god who protected their flocks. The most important gods of early peoples
were those who were believed to preside over the fertility of flocks, and
to provide good crops. Religion and industry went hand in hand among
both the aborigines and ancient peoples. So did politics, warfare, and
most social activities. Social customs were supposed to have been re-
vealed by the gods. Primitive education was scarcely more than initia-
tion into supernatural mysteries.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 671

In brief, the life of a savage is cradled in mystery, and matured in the
supernatural. The gods attend his birth, safeguard his youth, preside
at every milestone of his existence — adolescence, initiation into man-
hood, marriage, sickness, and death. They shower him with their favors
or crush him with their malice. Everything in primitive life is wrapped
in supernaturalism. The sun Is a god — later, the Greeks called him
Phoebus Apollo, and he was drawn around the heavens in a magnificent
chariot. The moon is a goddess — the Greeks, in their time, called her
Artemis (Roman, Diana) . The rivers, forests, winds, waves, flowers are
invested with human attributes. The earth and all its phenomena have
indwelling secret spirits, invisible, palpable, kind, ferocious, beneficent,
malignant. The primitive mind invests these spirits with romance and
drama, with comedy and tragedy. A mythology accumulates. The
popular mythology of Greece — perhaps one of the most beautiful and
attractive — is paralleled in part among even primitive tribes.

So powerful is the mystical or religious aspect of the uneducated mind
that, in many respects, civilization advances only in the degree to which
man frees himself from the spell of the supernatural, puts away his
animism, taboos, fetishes, totems — as a growing child puts away its
toys — and relies upon his intellect and observations to interpret the
varying manifestations of nature and the activities of his own psyche.

Development of Religion in Primitive Society. How did the super-
natural first enter man's mental world? The daily routine of primitive
existence left many desires unfulfilled, many questions unanswered about
nature and the human psyche. The supernatural hypothesis stepped in,
made man feel more at home with nature, provided him with an answer
to such simple and yet such difficult questions as: Why does the wind
blow? Why does the sun race around the heavens? What makes light-
ning strike? What causes shadows, images, dreams? What brings on
strong bodily sensations, particularly those associated with hunger and
sex?

Modern man, equipped with some knowledge of the sciences, is able to
give a convincing naturalistic explanation of almost everything which
puzzled primitive man. We know why water flows, why rocks are dis-
lodged from their natural foundations and crash down hillsides, why the
wind blows, what sends the rain down into the ground and stimulates the
growth of foliage, why the rivers become rag-ing torrents, what causes
bodily changes, and what produces stirring and pleasant sensations when
one comes in contact with an attractive person of the opposite sex.
Primitive man had to have recourse to the supernatural hypothesis to
find plausible explanations of these, and many other questions.

Alexander Goldenweiser divides religious experience into three major
phases: (1) the emotional thrill which comes from communion with the
supernatural world and from contact with its occult powers; (2) the
emotional satisfactions which come from participation in religious ritual,
chiefly through worship and the invocation of magic; and (3) the in-
tellectual convictions derived from theology, viewed as the conceptional

672 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

side of religion — the "reasoning out" of the mysteries of supernaturalism.
There are, then, three main aspects of religion : the emotional, which gives
driving force to religion; the activational, which expresses itself in re-
ligious rites and worship; and the conceptual, which rationalizes the
preceding and ultimately develops into theology.

Primitive man, thus being unable to defect, as we can, the secret work-
ings of nature, and also unable to unravel nature's laws, faced nature
with a question mark. This question mark was an endless source of
thrill-producing mysteries in the form of supernatural fictions.

Out of the basic hypothesis of a potent mysterious force which creates,
controls, and replenishes the world arose ghost worship, animal worship,
phallic worship, and the worship of nearly all the commonplace phe-
nomena of nature. At the outset, the mysterious force, which was be-
lieved to .guide the world, was not personified. It was looked upon as an
impersonal supernatural power which accounted for the activities of the
sun, moon, stars, waters, winds, men, plants, and animals. It was be-
lieved responsible for a wide range of experiences in savage life. The
name now given to this impersonal supernatural power is mana — the
term applied to it by the natives of Melanesia. Other primitive tribes
recognize this vague but awesome power under the name of manitou
(Algonquin Indians), orenda (Iroquois Indians), wakan (Sioux Indians),
and so on. The gradual emergence of a belief in spirits from the concept
of mana is exemplified by the theory of the Algonquins. Their manitou is
capable of either a personal or an impersonal interpretation. Religion
in this first period of impersonal supernaturalism has been called
animatism by R. R, Marett.

Primitive man in due time visualized this supernatural power in terms
of his own daily life and human relationships — where personalities pre-
vail. Once man took this step, he was well on his way to the creation of
the personnel and machinery of religion — spirits, gods, devils, and or-
ganized cults. This second stage of religious development, that in which
people came to believe in individualized or personified spirits, was called
animism by the famous English anthropologist Sir E. B. Tylor. Once
man had invented the world of personified spirits, the basic framework
of religion was well laid down. It was a logical step to assume that most
pleasant and beneficial things come through the aid of good spirits, and
disasters from evil spirits. In this way, the supernatural world was
divided into the two contending camps of benevolent and wicked spirits.

Early historic man was familiar with established social ranks. Certain
classes were servile, others aristocratic. Some were generous and noble,
others mean and wicked. These categories were projected into the in-
terpretation of the gods. Hence there arose a hierarchy of spirits. Some
of the early historic races imagined that the supernatural world is con-
trolled by a supreme benevolent spirit — God. He is continually assailed
by a supreme evil spirit — Satan. Each has a host of underlings (angels
or devils) fighting for his cause and obeying him as servants obey their
master.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 673

Religious thought has rarely, if ever, gone beyond this conception of a
hierarchy of good and^vil spirits. No great religious system ever de-
veloped into a literally pure monotheism. None has ever gone so far as
to imagine a supreme God, absolutely isolated, without angels and under-
lings, alone controlling this vast universe.

Out of polytheism there came an elaborate primitive mythology. Since
he was not hampered by considerations of exact scientific knowledge or
formal logic, primitive man could ramble on from one absurd fancy to
another.

The elevation of the notion of a hierarchy of good and evil spirits into
a grand cosmological philosophy, representing the universe as an arena
in which the principles of good and evil fight it out until good finally
prevails, was the product of Persian theology, a matter which we shall
deal with later.

Along with the hypothesis of a dynamic, creative, and all-pervading
supernaturalism, primitive man brought into being our ideas of a human
soul and human immortality. The primitive belief in animism implied
that all nature, including man, is animate, that is, possesses a spirit or
soul. There seemed to be special evidence to support the idea of a
second self or human soul. Man could see his image in a pool of water.
He might hear the echo of his voice. He had dreams in which his body
seemed to undergo definite experiences and to move from the spot. Yet,
on awakening, the body appeared not to have moved. Indeed, some
primitive peoples have exceeded the Christians in the matter of postulat-
ing a human soul, for they have believed in a plurality of souls.

Closely related to this notion of a soul or spiritual self has been the
belief in immortality, of which we have plenty of evidence among primi-
tive peoples — not only among existing primitives but in the burial prac-
tices of extinct preliterate peoples. But they rarely believed in a purely
spiritual immortality. They shared the orthodox Christian notion of a
bodily resurrection. The grounds for the primitive belief in immortality
were such things as the notion of a spiritual self which might survive
death, the imagery and philosophy growing out of dream experiences,
and the rationalized will to eternal existence, whether of the individual
or of his relatives and friends.

The notion of rewards and punishments after death was a natural out-
growth of primitive moral codes, with their ideas of compensation, and
of the hypothesis of good and evil spirits controlling life after death, a&
well as life on this earth. This idea was elaborated gradually. The
historical philosophies associated with the complex conceptions of heaven
and hell maintained by Christians and Muslims were, however, mainly
a Persian contribution.

The activational side of primitive religious experience falls into two
categories, namely, magic and worship. A number of the older anthro-
pologists, particularly Sir J. G. Frazer, were inclined to distinguish magic
from religion and to represent magic as primitive science. No reputable
anthropologist any longer entertains this view of the matter.

674 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

Magic is that phase of primitive religious behavior which is devoted
chiefly to the immediate realization of certain desired ends or objects.
Primitive man imagined that he could gain his ends by coercing the gods
according to a definite ritualistic contract that the gods had supposedly
revealed arid to which they had voluntarily agreed. If these occult
formulas were accurately complied with, then the gods, according to the
theory of magic, would hand over the desired results to the group. It
was even believed by some primitive peoples that these wished-for
results might be obtained, even without the participation of the gods,
by virtue of the very potency of the magic rites themselves.

Worship, as distinguished from magic, is the ritualistic and ceremonial
expression of man's attitude of awe, reverence, humility, and gratitude
with respect to the supernatural world and its dominating powers. In
both early and modern religious behavior, magic and worship have
usually been extensively intertwined, rather than sharply differentiated.
However, it is probably going too far to describe magic as the technique
of primitive religion, as certain writers have done.

Some writers, especially the eminent French anthropologists Hubert
and MaiiRg, have insisted that the chief difference between magic and
worship is that magic is regarded as the bad, or socially disapproved,
aspect of religious practices, while worship includes the socially proper
manifestations.

Such a distinction can scarcely be maintained. Magic, by its very
nature, had to be more occult, private, and technical than worship; but
this does not mean that it was always socially tabooed. Certain pagan
magical practices brought over into Christianity frequently had to be
executed under cover, but these were very special cases. The notion,
therefore, that magic is bad, or "black," is a late historical view, deeply
colored by Christian prejudices against pagan magic, witchcraft, sorcery,
and the like. This conception rarely prevailed in primitive society;
there, magic was distinguished from worship primarily by its more
practical and coercive character.

The Rise of Gods. The traditional notion represents man as made by
God in His image. History, however, shows man making gods to con-
form to his own physical image, as well as to his mental imagery. As
with religion in general, so with the deities in particular, early man
accounted for the mysteries of earth by inventing a supernatural realm
and its spirits. The gods were no more than glorified spirits. The whole
supernaturalistic structure — the gods, their life and their doings — became
simply a reflex of the real world — topographically, occupationally, tech-
nologically, and so forth. J. H. Dietrich summarizes the evolution of
gods out of earlier animistic beliefs in this way:

The recognition of the importance of some spirits over others, in connection
with the gradual understanding of certain natural processes, led men to depart-
mentalize and organize their deities, instead of ascribing a spirit to each and
every object. Things are grouped together, and one god is thought to preside
over a whole group. For example, they no longer think of a spirit in each tree,

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 675

but of a spirit presiding over all trees — the god of the forest; there is no longer
a spirit in each stream but a god of streams; no longer a god of each sea, but a
god of the seas. This stage of thought is best exemplified in the religion of the
Greeks and the Romans.

By this time, man had developed a highly organized family and social life
and this was carried over into the realm of the gods; so that the gods were
related, and special functions and responsibilities assigned to each, and the
importance of the god or goddess determined by the importance of the function.
Man had also by now attained a much higher degree of culture and there came
to be gods of the thought and emotional world, such as the goddess of wisdom
and the goddess of love. Thus arose twelve major deities and the countless
minor divinities of the pagan world, forming a well-organized pantheon of gods
and goddesses.1

Man has shown a tendency to create gods to preside over all experiences
of vital importance to the individual and the group. Consequently, the
number and character of the gods devised by any people depend upon
the emotional experiences of the members of that group. Some experi-
ences are universal, such as fertility, hunger, and life and death. There-
fore, we find certain universal deities that appear among the gods of every
people. Many experiences, however, are peculiar to a people because of
the differences in living conditions brought about by the specific divergen-
cies in geographical environment. Thus there arise wide variations in
the nature and functions of regional deities.

All we can say in the way of a sweeping generalization is that wherever,
in early civilization, there was an emotional experience of great im-
portance to the race, man had the raw material out of which a god might
be — and usually was — created.

We may consider first those gods who owe their existence to experiences
common to all men. One such body of experience grows out of the re-
productive instinct. The sexual urge is responsible for a great number
of deities in all pantheons. Household gods are numerous, and have their
assigned functions. But reproduction is something which goes far beyond
the perpetuation and increase of the human race. It involves all nature.
Therefore, man created potent gods of fertility, of life and death, and
rebirth. Noticing that the female seems to be the all-important factor
in human reproduction, man frequently created female deities or god-
desses to embody the generalized concept of fertility and reproduction.
Because of the vital importance of the growth of vegetation and the
increase of domestic animals, the fertility goddesses loomed large in the
religion and mythology of early peoples. Such were Isthar (Astarte) of
the Babylonians, Kubaba of the Hittites (later known as Cybele), Deme-
ter of the Greeks, and Tellus of the Romans.

For each of the important crises in life, such as birth, puberty, mar-
riage, sickness, and death, a god was usually provided for man's protec-
tion. There are also natural occurrences, such as seasonal changes and
the passage of day into night and night into day, which all men observe.

*How the Gods Were Made, privately printed, 1926, p. 10; c/. Joseph McCabe,
How Man Made God, Haldeman-Julius, 1931.

676 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

Accordingly, every pantheon has deities for seasons and for light and
darkness. Further, strong drink and drugs produce strange and powerful
reactions. Consequently, we find among the Greeks Dionysus, the vine
god, arid in India a god for Soma, a powerful liquor made from leaves of
a mountain plant.

As a result of special geographic circumstances, gods of the mountains,
plains, desert, forest, or the sea are given varying degrees of importance,
according to the habitat of the different peoples. Each occupation
and industry is usually presided over by a god. Hunters, shepherds, and
agricultural peoples have always invented deities appropriate to their
several occupations. Moreover, the shepherd especially depends on
animal fertility, the farmer on weather, the fisherman on the sea. Gods
are provided to look after each of these needs. There is also a tendency
to deify animals — those upon which, for any reason, man depends, as
well as those he especially fears.

The multiplicity of gods in early civilizations is difficult for us to
understand today. Take, for instance, Roman household gods. First
there was Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, the center of family worship.
Next came the di penates, or gods of the family storeroom. Then there
was the god of the paterfamilias, the procreative power which continued
the family 's existence — a sort of symbol of the germ plasm; the god of
the door or threshold, called Janus; and finally, the lar familiaris, or the
spirit of the boundaries of the family domain. Added to these, of course,
was the great number of Roman public gods.

Man deifies man as well as nature. Most consciously he tends to give
ancestors and the heroes of the past divine attributes, much as we glorify
George Washington and the founders of our country. The political head
of society was often deified in early civilization; so were military heroes.

Not only does man create gods and assign them certain functions, he
even invests them with moral attributes. In this process, too, the facts
are exactly the opposite of what is usually believed. It is generally
assumed that God created and revealed our moral codes. The Deca-
logue was handed to Moses on Mount Sinai, right and wrong are decided
upon in heaven, and so on. As a matter of fact, man has always pro-
jected his own moral beliefs on the gods. He has attributed to the gods
the origin of the folkways that were gradually worked out by each social
group in the course of its life experiences.

This is admirably illustrated by the Old Testament God, Yahweh, who
first appeared as a crude supernatural power symbolized by upright
stones — a phallic symbol. He then developed into a ruthless tribal
divinity of desert nomads, bidding his followers savagely to destroy these
enemies who worshiped gods other than Yahweh. Ultimately, Yahweh
became a universal providence, directing the affairs of nature and man
and controlling the course of history.

In preliterary times, the gods were the product of man's unrestrained
imagination. As culture developed and man learned to write, his deities
were given more precise and permanent attributes. We shall have occa-

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 677

sion to illustrate this trend as we describe the pantheons of historical
peoples.

Fundamental Religious Concepts and Practices. First and foremost
in primitive religious thought is the realm of things sacred, those things
which are charged with the mystical mana, the vague but potent source
of supernatural power. Usually, sacred things can be handled safely
only by specialists in mystery, priests or medicine men (shamans).
Nearly all individual, social, and industrial activities were under the
spell of the supernatural, and so the shaman, or medicine man, was very
powerful in primeval society.

Closely allied to the concept of sacredness are the notions of clean and
unclean. In most cases, these terms have no relation to considerations
of hygiene or aesthetics, but are connected with ideas of safety and
danger. A "clean" thing is free of the supernatural or of danger there-
from. It is safe. Contact with it does not expose one to mysterious
risks and possible disasters. The unclean is steeped in mystery. Evil
forces play around it. Contamination with it may bring tragedy. Only
proper religious rites, administered by "authorized" persons, may, at
times, make the unclean become clean and safe.

Next we may look at the concept of sacrifice, a highly important rite,
combining both magic and worship. The purposes of sacrifice are varied.
It may be a way of offering thanks to the gods — one gives them a share
of his crops, or cattle. At other times, sacrifice serves to bring gods and
votaries together, thereby cementing the bond between them and renew-
ing the covenant. Sacrifice may also be used to increase the volume of
mana or spiritual grace in the community or to bring the social group into
contact with its mysterious operations.

Sacrifice takes on varied forms. In "theophagy" a worshiper may eat
the symbol of the god, or the god's representative, man or animal, thereby
imbibing the mana residing in that which is consumed. On the whole,
sacrifice usually expresses gratitude and loyalty to the gods, or it is
indulged in for the sake of securing supernatural aid in times of stress.

Taboo is the fundamental primitive means of executing social control.
It aims to make human life safe. The gods are supposed to indicate
what types of conduct they approve, and what they disapprove. Dis-
approved acts are taboo — forbidden. If one never violates taboos, he
is likely to remain in the favor of the gods, thus receiving and retaining
spiritual grace. There may be taboos against marrying certain people,
eating certain animals (consider the Jewish dietary laws), working on
certain days (the Christian Sunday, for instance, or Jewish Sabbath),
coming into contact with strangers (Jewish dislike of Gentiles) , and so
on. In a word, taboos are the "don'ts" — the red lights — of primitive
society.

Fetishism pervades primitive religion. It is the worship of objects
which are believed to harbor spirits and therefore bring good luck. In
a few instances, however, fetishism does not involve the residence of a
spirit in an object. In western Africa, for example, the magical power

678 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

in the object is looked upon as impersonal and no indwelling spirit is
implied.

Primitive religion abounds with ritual, particularly for handling safely
those crises which are supposed to be specifically charged with mana,
and hence especially dangerous. To ward off potential evils during these
crucial periods of existence, one must indulge in specified types of rites,
thereby propitiating the proper deities. Hence, nearly all primitive
tribes invest birth, adolescence, initiation into manhood and womanhood,
marriage, sickness, and death with a distinct sense of the sacred and
mysterious, and provide specific religious rites to handle them safely.
These, as Professor Marett and others have made clear, are the primitive
origins of the famous sacramental system of the Roman Catholic church,
to which we shall later pay attention.

An important concept of primitive religion and social relations is
toteinism. Commonly, a group regards itself as descended from or aided
by some plant, animal, or object, towards which it observes an attitude
of veneration. Totemism is important as furnishing the basis for
marriage taboos — fellow totemites usually may not marry — and in stimu-
lating ceremonial activities.

Finally, we must say a little more about primitive "clergy," medicine
men, or shamans. They are exalted, ineffable beings, holding special
communion with the gods. They alone can deal safely with the super-
natural powers and competently handle the sacred, since they themselves
are filled with mana.

Two types of shamans are found in primitive society — those especially
adept in administering rituals and performing ceremonies, and those of a
more saintly cast, who dwell mentally in peculiarly mystical regions.
The latter are the "holy men." They live apart. Tribesmen come to
them for counsel, revelation, and regeneration. In later religions, they
became the prophets. The ceremonial shaman became the priest.

Primitive chieftains and kings frequently are supposed to be endowed
with mana. On this account they are entitled to high position and great
respect. Their special reserve of mana enables them to contact the
sacred powers. Hence it is not uncommon to find priest-kings among
frarbarians. The medieval and modern doctrine of the divine right of
kings is little more than a sophisticated vestige of this picturesque bit of
primitive speculation.

The Christian Synthesis. We have now discussed briefly the origins
and leading traits of religion. Little progress in fundamentals has been
made by any great world religion beyond the beliefs and practices which
we have outlined. We do not have the space here to describe the re-
ligions of the Ancient East, which represent a slightly more sophisticated
expression of the foregoing primitive dogmas and rites. We must pass
on to a survey of the nature of the Christian religion, which has dominated
the Western world for two millenniums.

Christianity is frequently believed to have appeared suddenly, as a
new and fully-fashioned religion, some two thousand years ago. But

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 679

the historian of religion recognizes that Christianity drew heavily upon
earlier strains in religious belief and practice and combined many of the
most popular and potent trends in the religions of all the peoples around
the Mediterranean basin. Indeed, its very comprehensiveness was one
of the chief sources of the strength of Christianity. It had many dogmas
and rites, some one of which would appeal very strongly to a given group
of potential converts. It had some form of strong appeal to Jew and
Gentile, Greek and barbarian, rich and poor, the mighty and the meek.
We may now turn our attention to the manner in which Christianity com-
bined portions of the religions of the antique world and built up an
imposing religious synthesis.

The fundamental doctrines in Christianity were common to all re-
ligions. Primitive man had provided the basic beliefs essential for deal-
ing effectively with the supernatural world. Primitive man had intro-
duced the doctrine of supernatural power, and had classified its agents
into good and evil spirits. He had introduced various rituals — worship,
magic, sacrifice, baptism, birth, death, initiation, and purification rites —
all of which expressed man's fear and gratitude with respect to the super-
natural powers who were believed to control the world. These were at
the root of Judaism and other eastern prototypes of Christianity, and
most of them still persist in orthodox Catholicism and Protestantism.

The religion of the Jews, developed over hundreds of years, made many
obvious contributions to Christianity. Christians measured historical
time by means of the Jewish chronology, which ran back to the Creation.
Jewish history provided the framework of the Christian historical per-
spective and the heroes of the Christian past — Moses, Joshua, Samson,
David, Solomon, and the like. Even Enoch and Lot crowded out Pericles.
The Christian cosmology — the theory of the origin and development of
the universe, the earth, and its inhabitants — was derived primarily from
Genesis.

The Jews also gave the Christians their particular deity. Their tribal
God, Yahweh, became the Christian God. Jewish scriptures supplied the
basis for the expected coming of Christ — namely, the so-called Messianic
hope. Finally, the Jews contributed Jesus, whom they later disowned.

Much of early Christian morality was also obtained from the Old
Testament. God's revelations in respect to good conduct, and his mani-
fest will in such matters, as illustrated by Old Testament examples, were
accepted by Christian converts.

Pre-Christian asceticism was found in certain Jewish cults which
echoed the denunciation of human vanity and futility to be found in the
literature attributed to Solomon, and urged withdrawal from the world.
John the Baptist presumably belonged to such a sect, the Essenes.

Other sacred books of the Jews in addition to the Bible, such as the
Talmud, and later the Cabala, similarly exerted a deep influence on
Christianity, These were worked into Christianity by scholarly Jewish
converts.

Some Jewish lore which the Christians took over, such as the legends

680 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

relative to the Creation and the Deluge, originally came from Babylonian
sources, while it was believed by the late James H. Breasted, and others,
that the Messianic hope of the Jews originated in Egyptian social phi-
losophy, whence the Jews borrowed it.

From the Persians came what was perhaps the most influential of all
the elements that entered into Christianity — namely, the notion of the
overwhelming importance of the life to come. The Persians were the
first to provide elaborate and dogmatic answers to the eternal question:
Why did the universe and man come into existence? They believed that
God had created the universe as an arena where the principles of good
and evil could engage in decisive combat, and where the triumph of good
over evil might be overwhelmingly demonstrated. Those who had be-
lieved in the principle of good, represented by Ormuzd, the Persian God,
would be rewarded by a life of immortal happiness in the world to come.
Those who had been foolish enough to pin their hopes on the forces of
evil, championed by Ahriman, the Persian devil, would be thrown into
a lake of fire and brimstone.

The Persians were probably the first people to whom the future life
was a mutter of all-absorbing interest. There was little thought of
future punishment in early Jewish theology. Sheol was regarded as a
vague place of the dead, retribution having already taken place in this
world. Not until the Jews were influenced by the Persians, as reflected
in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, did they develop the idea of future
torment. The Greeks and Romans believed in a sort of drab and in-
different afterlife in Hades, where men were neither sad nor glad, though
certain specially hideous criminals might receive appropriate punishment.

The Persian eschatology made the next world a challenge to conduct
in this world. Indifference to the future life was no longer possible, since
the good would be forever blessed and the wicked eternally punished.

Christianity derived its idea of immortality from Persia partly through
direct contact with competing Persian religions like Mithraism and
Manichaeism, and partly from the Jews of pre-Christian days. These
Jews had taken over the Persian beliefs, as is particularly evident in the
Book of Enoch and other late Jewish literature.

The Persians, through Mithraism, contributed, in addition, the famous
light-and-darkness symbolism, associating light with good, and darkness
with evil. Incidentally, they supplied the particular date chosen for
Christmas. The twenty-fifth day of December was the day of the great
Mithraic feast celebrating the returning strength of their sun god after
the winter solstice. From Mithraism also, rather than from the tradi-
tional Jewish Sabbath, was derived Sunday, with its taboo on work.
Many Christian rites, such as the use of bells, candles, and the like, were
imitated from Mithraic usage ; whence likewise came the blood symbolism
in baptism.

Into Christianity were also drafted elements of Manichaeism, a strange
compound of Persian, Babylonian, and Buddhist religions, founded by

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 681

Manes of Ctesiphon (A.D. 215-272). It laid special stress on renuncia-
tion of the flesh, the vividness of heaven and hell, and the symbolism of
light and darkness. Manichaeism, we may noter persisted down to late
medieval times among the Cathari of Italy, the Albigenses of southern
France, and certain Bulgarian sects, such as the Bogomiles. The phi-
losopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) thought well of it in modern times.

The Greeks left innumerable impressions on Christianity. Scholarly
Greeks converted to Christianity could not rest satisfied with the real
Jesus, portrayed as an unlettered village workman, whose intimates and
disciples were fishermen. They had to exalt him to high metaphysical
rank, where he could rival the Platonic logos, the source of all truth.
Hence Christian theology became essentially Greek metaphysics, restated
and revalued in relation to the person and mission of Jesus. In Gnosti-
cism, a logical but extreme development of this metaphysical interpreta-
tion, Jesus all but ceased to be a person and became an abstract philo-
sophical principle, an illuminating and redeeming revelation of religious
truth and prophecy. Most of the great heresies of the early church were
little more than unofficial Hellenized views of Jesus' nature and mission.

The moral austerity of Christianity drew heavily upon the Stoic eulogy
of moral earnestness. The Stoics also contributed their cosmopolitan
outlook, and their attitude of mental resignation before the all-pervading
will of God, as expressed in nature and the life experiences of man.
Neoplatonism provided Christianity with its underlying mental atmos-
phere— the contention that an attitude of faith and credulity most befit
a religious person and that they are the means of attaining contact with
the Infinite. It thus stimulated Christian mysticism. Finally, when
Aristotle was rediscovered by the Middle Ages and approved by the
church, Hellenic logic laid the foundations for the mature body of
Catholic doctrine — Scholasticism.

Christian ritual was borrowed in part from the Greek mysteries. The
holiest of Christian rites, the Eucharist, was invented by Paul as an
imitation of the sacred meal of the Eleusinian mysteries. Baptism and
the brilliant Christian liturgy and ritual were drawn primarily from
Hellenistic orientalism. Greek rhetoric furnished the models for Chris-
tian preaching, and the original name of a Christian church — ecclesia —
was of Greek origin.

Rome brought to Christianity its genius for organization and adminis-
tration. Roman law, adapted to religious cases, became the famous
Canon Law of the medieval church. When the Christian church spread
around the Mediterranean world it took over the system of administration
used by the Roman emperors. It even adopted many of the administra-
tive districts and titles. The title of bishop, for example, had been that
of the leading civil officer of the Roman municipalities in the East — the
ancient equivalent of a mayor.

The Romans also made important contributions to Christian ritual.
Roman rites dealing with birth, puberty, marriage, and death — milestones

682 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

of life especially safeguarded in Roman religion — passed over into Chris-
tian baptism, confirmation, the sacramental wedding, and the ecclesiasti-
cal funeral. Roman notions of religio, embracing attitudes of awe,
anxiety, and piety, and the conception of the sacred as something given
over to God, also exerted a real influence on Christian doctrine.

Finally, when Christianity was accepted by the barbarians of northern
Europe, the primitive beliefs, rites, and festivals of these backward
peoples were carried over into their new religion and a fusion between
the two resulted. The antique primitivism in Christianity, which had
survived from the preliterary period, was thus merged with the currently
primitive culture of the barbarian converts.

The foregoing does not exhaust the accretions to Christianity drawn
from many sources. But it does show how the composite character of
the new religion gave it a potential appeal to many areas, cultures, sects,
and linguistic stocks. It was the most syncretic, and therefore the most
attractive, of all the cults which competed for favor in the later Roman
Empire.

At first, there was a tendency to regard Christianity as a religion for
the Jews only. A special vision was required to convert Peter to the idea
that Christianity should be spread over the whole pagan world. This
attitude is mirrored in the Gospel according to Matthew and the conflict
it engendered is shown in the Book of Acts. Paul proclaimed the uni-
versal purpose of Christianity once and forever, and it appears in the
Acts, the Pauline Epistles, and the Gospel according to Luke, which was
written under Pauline influence.

The Christians made the most of their missionary opportunities. One
of the great advantages of conversion to Christianity in the early days
was that it offered a chance to live one's daily life in a pagan society and,
at the same time, claim communion in the kingdom of God and look
forward to salvation in the world to come. The idea that all Christians
in the first and second centuries lived like terror-stricken refugees is quite
false. Only during periods of persecution were they driven underground
— and then only in certain places.

No torture Rome could devise, and the Latins have been past masters
in the art, could halt the flow of converts. By A.D. 300 there were so
many Christians that persecution seemed pointless. Christianity had
become an organized defiance of imperial law. In 311, the Emperor
Galerius revoked the edict of persecution of 303 and introduced an era of
tolerance. In 313, Constantine the Great issued the famous Edict of
Milan, which legalized Christianity. In 325 he called the great Council
Nicea, which adjusted for a time the doctrinal dispute between the Arians
and the Athanasians by deciding in favor of the latter and settling the
problem of the Trinity.

After Constantine's death, paganism was practically doomed. Chris-
tians were favored over pagans. By the time of the famous code of
Theodosius II (438) Christianity had become a religious monopoly de-
fended by the state, The worship of heathen gods was forbidden, The

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 683

Christians turned the tables on their enemies and soon more than evened
the score through vigorous persecution of the pagans.

Far and away the most important medieval institution was the Catholic
Church, which became thoroughly enmeshed in the feudal system. Some
of the most powerful feudal lords were abbots, bishops, and archbishops.
The Roman Catholic Church has been usually and quite rightly regarded
as a spiritual agency designed to procure salvation. But assuring salva-
tion for its millions of communicants necessitated an elaborate adminis-
trative and financial organization. At its height, there were over 500,000
clergy in the church:

The Church was essentially an organized state, thoroughly centralized, with
one supreme head and a complete gradation of officials; with a comprehensive
system of law courts for trying cases, with penalties covering all crimes, and
with prisons for punishing offenders. It demanded an allegiance from all its
members somewhat like that existing today between subjects and a state. It
developed one official language, the Latin, which was used to conduct its business
everywhere. Thus all western Europe was one great religious association from
which it was treason to revolt. Canon law punished such a crime with death,
public opinion sanctioned it, and the secular arm executed the sentence.2

It is clear, then, that, in addition to its spiritual prestige and preroga-
tives, the Catholic church of the Middle Ages was a vast international
state of greater territorial extent and financial resources than any secular
power of the period. From parish to provinces, all united under the
jurisdiction of the Holy See, it not only embraced much the larger part
of Europe but also boasted colonies of converts in Africa and Asia.

The foregoing view of the medieval church helps us to understand the
nature pf the Protestant revolution. It was not simply an attempt to
modify the doctrine of the Church. It was far more truly a political
and economic secession from the great international ecclesiastical state,
motivated principally by the desire to be free from its financial exactions.

Protestantism and Rationalism. It is commonly supposed by both
devout Protestants and Catholics that the Protestant Reformation
brought into existence a type of Christianity profoundly different from
Roman Catholicism. We may appropriately investigate this conviction,
first briefly looking into the actual changes introduced.3

In the first place, the Protestants stamped out what they regarded as
the leading aspects of ecclesiastical corruption. They suppressed com-
pletely the sale of indulgences. They strove for a simpler and more
direct form of worship. They particularly attacked those phases of
Catholic worship and ritual which were based on the doctrine of salvation
by good works. They abolished the veneration of relics, the adoration of
images, and the practice of making pilgrimages to holy places. They
profoundly modified the central Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation

2 A. C. Flick, The Rise of the Medieval Church, Putnam, 1909, pp. 603-304.
8 For a sympathetic interpretation, see Burris Jenkins, The World's Debt to
Protestantism, Stratford, 1930.

684 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

in the sacrament of the Mass by denying the miraculous transformation
of the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus. The
Lutherans, however, accepted "consubstantiation" or the "corporeal
presence." The Bible, rather than the dogmas of the Church fathers
and Catholic theologians, became the guide of the Protestant Christian
in his religious devotions. The Protestants denied the necessity of a
mediating priesthood to bring the believer into contact with God. The
Protestants contended that a Christian could secure God's attention di-
rectly through personal worship and prayer. Thus, they put special
emphasis on the importance of the individual conscience in matters re-
ligious.

The degree to which Protestantism differed, even in matters religious,
from the parent Catholic church greatly depended upon the particular
Protestant sect. With the early Lutherans and Angelicans the divergence
from Catholicism in worship was relatively slight — in spite of doctrinal
differences. On the other hand, the more radical religious groups, such
as the Anabaptists and the later evangelical sects, almost completely
abandoned the old Catholic rites and practices.

Nevertheless, as the able German church historian Ernst Troeltsch
has made very clear, the fundamental religious differences between the
Catholics and even the radical Protestants were not extensive. This
fact was commonly overlooked in the fierce partisanship which charac-
terized the controversies between Catholics and Protestants. Both
Catholics and orthodox Protestants fully accepted the whole Christian
Epic, as outlined in the Old and New Testaments. The Bible was the
central sacred book of their religion. Catholics and Protestants alike
were primarily concerned with making a proper adjustment to the super-
natural world and with securing the salvation of the individual soul in
the world to come. The medieval doctrines of heaven and hell were
adopted with no marked change by all Protestants. To Luther in par-
ticular, the devil and his hosts became more real and fearful beings.
Evangelical divines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to
lay far more stress upon the horrors of hell and the dangers of damnation
than Catholic theologians of pre-Reformation days. Moreover, the
Protestants were just as alert and severe as Catholics in their denuncia-
tion of sceptics and freethinkers. It is no exaggeration to say that, upon
at least 95 per cent of all matters of strictly religious import, Catholics
and Protestants were in agreement. They were also about equally an-
tagonistic to the inroads of theological liberalism and secular scepticism.

Protestants have taken great pride in having discarded many allegedly
idolatrous Catholic practices. But they weakened the emotional power
of their churches by depriving them of the most potent appeal of the
Catholic church: its visual and auricular imagery. The rich emotion-
bearing ritual and liturgy of the Catholic church were far better cal-
culated to attract and hold a mass of faithful believers than the
metaphysical dogmatism of Calvin or the vocal emotionalism of other
Protestant cults. This is even more apparent today than it was in the

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 685

sixteenth century. The intellectual classes, to whom the Calvinistic
metaphysics and doctrinal sermons appealed, have now generally dis-
carded all types of orthodoxy and found other forms of intellectual
interest. In its non-religious aspects, Protestantism was notable for the
impetus it gave to nationalism, capitalism, and the spirit of business
enterprise.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, certain intellectual
leaders in Europe and America brought into being a somewhat different
attitude toward religion than had prevailed in either the Protestant or
the Catholic camp. The philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) insisted
that religion should be a matter of reason rather than emotion and blind
faith. But he remained loyal to Protestant Christianity. More ad-
vanced were the so-called Deists, a group of religious liberals, extending
in their influence from Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1645) to Thomas
Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who lived nearly two centuries later. Other
important writers in this group were Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston,
and Matthew Tindal. The Christians had believed in the uniqueness
and arbitrariness of their religion, but the Deists held that the true reli-
gion must be universal and reasonable. The Deists were greatly influ-
enced by the new natural science and tended to identify nature with God
and such natural laws as that of gravitation with divine laws. Essen-
tially, the Deistic religious beliefs were the following: (1) God exists;
(2) it is desirable to worship God; (3) the chief end of worship is to
promote better living; (4) this implies and requires repentance of sins;
and (5) there is a future life, in which man will be dealt with according
to his conduct here on earth. It will thus be apparent that the Deists
were devout believers in God, the divinity of Jesus, and the future life.
But they rejected both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, which they
regarded as a departure from the true teachings of Jesus.

Some philosophers of this period, such as the Frenchman Pierre Bayle,
and the Englishman David Hume, went further than the Deists and
raised serious doubts as to the validity of religion, the existence of God,
and the future life. But they did not dogmatically deny God's existence.
They roughly resembled the Agnostics of our day. Some other thinkers,
such as Baron d'Holbach, went the whole way to overt atheism and
frankly denied the existence of God. It was at this time also that
Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, Astruc, and others began the criticism of the
Bible, which was ultimately to give us an accurate historical notion of
the origin and nature of this work. These developments are interesting
mainly as a phase of the history of human thought. The great mass of
the people remained steadfast in the orthodox Catholic or Protestant
faith.

In the century following 1750, there was a reaction against the liberal
religious views we have just described briefly. Romanticism, led by
Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and others, represented a philo-
sophical onslaught against rationalism. It laid great stress on man's
emotional life and on the all-important nature of deep religious feeling

686 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

and vivid personal religious experience. The Christian Evidences move-
ment, dating from William Paley and others in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, assaulted Deism and scepticism and appealed to
nature, as God's handiwork, to vindicate the existence and creative
activity of a personal God. The Oxford movement in England was
designed to revive spirituality in the Angelican church. By the middle
of the nineteenth century the religious temper of Europe was far more
devout than it had been in the days of Voltaire.

At the same time, the foundations were being laid for a new revolt
against orthodox religion more serious and comprehensive than any which
had ever taken place in the previous history of man. This was founded
upon the new natural science, including the doctrine of evolution, scepti-
cal philosophy, biblical scholarship, anthropology, and cultural history.
Some alert writers have compared the present period with the first cen-
turies of the Roman Empire, which was an age of dissolution of ancient
faiths and the development of new forms of religious doctrines. This
comparison does not seem to hold in any comprehensive fashion, since
the present era presents a challenge to religion far more sweeping and
serious than anything which transpired in the classical age. The religious
situation which arose in the Mediterranean world at the close of the
Roman republic represented merely a challenge to some of the existing
religions and attested the decay of certain older faiths. That revolu-
tion was not in any sense whatever a challenge to supernatural religion
itself, for the dying religions were replaced by others as pregnant with
superstition and supernaturalism as were the religions of ancient Greece
or of early agricultural Rome. Even bitter critics of religion, such as
Lucretius, believed firmly in the existence of gods, but held that the
latter had no interest in mankind.

Today, the situation is far different. We are now in possession of a
body of knowledge and a resulting set of intellectual and social attitudes
which offer a challenge not merely to orthodox Catholicism and Funda-
mentalist Protestantism but to supernatural religions of any sort what-
soever. There has never been a religious crisis of this kind before,
#nd any attempt to make precise comparisons with the past are here
bound to be misleading and distorting. Even the extreme classical
assailants of pagan religions, like Lucretius, had no such basis for the
critical attitude as have the contemporary sceptics. The bitter attack
of Lucretius upon supernatural religion was based mainly upon assump-
tions and intuitions as incapable of proof at the time as were the most
extreme pietistic views of his age.

Contemporary science, especially astrophysics, renders the whole set
of assumptions underlying the anthropomorphic and geocentric super-
naturalism of the past archaic and unsupportable. Our scientific and
historical knowledge has undermined the holy books of all peoples. The
development of biblical criticism has discredited the dogma of the direct
revelation and unique nature of the Hebrew Bible. Textual scholarship
has been equally devastating to the sacred scriptures which form the

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 687

literary basis of the other world religions. Most devastating of all has
been the removal by psychology of all mystery from religious experience.
It avails one nothing to deny these things, for they are literally un-
deniable. We must face the implied intellectual revolution honestly
and see what is to be done about it. Nor does it suffice to get angry at a
writer who brings forward these truths, so unpleasant to many of a pious
turn of mind. No individual writer is to blame for these changes. If
one becomes indignant over the intellectual progress of the last century
he must logically direct his anger comprehensively against the combined
results of the researches of the natural scientists, cultural historians,
textual critics, and social scientists of the era.

Outstanding Religious Groups in the
Twentieth Century

We have briefly surveyed the origins and development of religious
thought and attitudes to the opening of the twentieth century. We may
now take a brief inventory of the prevailing types of religious attitudes.
The marked divergencies in the beliefs of the major religious groups of
our day are explained by the wide differences in the degree to which
members of the community have entered into the intellectual currents of
modern times. Some have been profoundly influenced by science and
critical philosophy, while others have remained essentially oblivious to
them. Others fall between these two extremes.

In western Christendom today we find essentially the following group-
ings: thfe completely orthodox, the Devout Modernists, and the Advanced
Modernists. The completely orthodox believe in a personal God, accept
the Bible as the literal word of God, proclaim the complete divinity of
Jesus, and believe in the personal immortality of the human soul. This
group is still numerous, particularly among the agricultural groups and
among the lower middle class in urban populations, who accept without
question the whole Christian Epic: the biblical God, the theory of a
special creation about six thousand years ago, the deluge, the theory of
the chosen race, the Messianic hope, the vicarious sacrifice and messiah-
ship of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, a literal future life, and the reality
of heaven and hell. These ideas are shared by orthodox Catholics and
Protestants alike. They have modified but slightly the general complex
of religious faith held by St. Paul, Augustine, or Luther.

Among the Protestants in the United States, a large group of these
orthodox believers founded a movement which is known as Fundamen-
talism. There was an inevitable tendency for teachings of an unsettling
character finally to seep down to the masses. Alarmed, the latter organ-
ized to repel scepticism and unbelief. Consequently, during and follow-
ing the first World War, ultra-orthodox organizations began to spring
up — the Christian Fundamentals League, the League of Evangelical Stu-
dents, various Bible institutes, and many anti-scientific societies. But

688 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

the most comprehensive organization was the World's Christian Funda-
mentals Association, founded in 1918 by the Rev. William B. Riley of
Minneapolis, the leader of American Fundamentalism. The aggressive
clerical leaders of American Fundamentalism have been Riley, Curtis
L. Laws, J. C. Massee, R. A. Torrey, John Roach Straton, Mark A. Mat-
thews, J, Gresham Machen, and J. Frank Norris.

The Fundamentalist platform embodies the following five "minimum
basic doctrines": "(1) the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible; (2) the
virgin birth and the complete deity of Christ Jesus; (3) the resurrection of
the same body of Jesus which was three days buried; (4) the substitution-
ary atonement of Jesus for the sins of the world; (5) the second coining
of Jesus in bodily form, according to the Scriptures." Mr. Riley insisted
upon adding to the above a firm belief in a literal heaven and hell. He
was joined by Mr. Straton.

The Fundamentalists organized a number of anti-scientific societies
and warred against those scientific teachings which seemed to threaten
orthodoxy. They succeeded in placing anti-evolution laws on the statute
books of three American states and narrowly missed success in a number
of others. The most dramatic episode in the history of American Funda-
mentalism was the Scopes trial in Tennessee in the summer of 1925, in
which William Jennings Bryan joined in a legal duel with the great
agnostic, Clarence Darrow. Tennessee had passed a law forbidding the
teaching of evolution in the schools. The Fundamentalists arrested a
young high school teacher named J. T. Scopes on the charge of teaching
evolution. His trial attracted great interest. Mr. Bryan, who led the
prosecution, died of excessive heat and overeating during the closing days
of the trial, and American Fundamentalism lost its most powerful and
colorful champion. During the trial Bryan expounded the fundamental-
ist conviction that it is not what science proves to be the truth, but rather
what the majority of the people want to believe which should dominate
in a democracy. The fundamentalist attitude toward modern science
is illustrated by the following pronouncement of Edward Y. Clarke, former
Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and one of the leaders in the
battle against evolution: "In another two years, from Maine to California
and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, there will be lighted in this country
countless bonfires, devouring these damnable and detestable books on
evolution."

The Fundamentalists and other orthodox groups have one undoubted
source of strength which cannot be claimed by the more liberal Christians.
This is the clarity and logic of their position, once we grant their
assumptions. This consideration has been ably stated by John Herman
Randall:

Orthodoxy has, moreover, an intellectual power that liberalism has so far
lacked. In the face of uncertainty and confusion, the muddled thinking and
mingling of contradictory ideas, that so abound in modernist circles, its theological
tenets stand out with clarity and precision. In accepting them there is no vague
hoping to eat one's cake and still have it. The orthodox know just where they

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 689

stand. Particularly is this true of the refined and elaborate thought of Catholic
philosophy. The Church has never countenanced what it calls fkleism, reliance
on sentiment and emotion alone. It has recognized that a great body of men can
be united only by a faith that is clear-cut and objective. It has always stood for
rationalism, and today its rationalistic philosophy has a great appeal for those
disheartened by the irritationalism and voluntarism of modern thought. To be
sure, it has always dictated the authoritative premises ; but that in itself has much
to recommend it over mere personal prejudice and bias.

So markedly does the clarity of orthodoxy contrast with the confusion and more
or less unconscious hypocrisy of liberalism, that more radical minds who have
broken with traditional religion completely are apt to respect the orthodox be-
liever more highly than the muddled modernist. They do not speak his lan-
guage; but they can understand what he means, and appreciate the power of the
experience he expresses. Nothing is more difficult for the outsider to sympathize
with, than the attempt to combine two loyalties; nothing harder to understand
than the man who remains within the church without believing, who recites the
creed with mental denial.4

The Devout Modernists represent a group within Christendom which
has mad« an effort to come to terms with science and scholarship, espe-
cially the science and scholarship of the nineteenth century. They at
least formally accept the doctrine of evolution and the conclusions of
historical and textual criticism with respect to the nature of the Bible,
which they frankly admit is a wrork written by man. But they regard
the Bible as a unique work on religion. Most of them believe firmly in
God, interpreted in a paternal pattern, and regard Jesus as a unique
and divinely inspired religious leader. They still maintain a respectful
attitude toward the immortality of the soul, though many of them no
longer believe in a literal heaven and hell. They tend to regard the ex-
perience of religious conversion as a proof of the divine character of
religion and as something close to the miraculous. They have been drawn
almost entirely from the ranks of the Protestants, all devout Catholics
still adhering resolutely to the tenets of orthodoxy.

The most complete and authoritative revelation of the nature of the
beliefs of the devout modernist element in American Christianity is con-
tained in the very important work of George Herbert Betts, The Beliefs
of Seven Hundred Ministers.5 A systematic questionnaire was submitted
to 500 liberal ministers and 200 students in theological seminaries. Of
the 500 ministers, 100 per cent believed that God exists; 98 per cent
believed that the relation of God to man is best expressed by the word
"Father"; 95 per cent believed that God is a being with personal attri-
butes, complete and perfect in all moral qualities; 71 per cent believed
that Jesus was born of a virgin without a human father; 82 per cent
believed that while on earth Jesus possessed and used his powers to restore
the dead to life. Some 84 per cent believed that after Jesus was dead
and buried he actually rose from the dead, leaving the tomb empty ; 92

4 J. H. Randall, Religion and the Modern World, Henry Holt, 1929, p. 145.

5 Abington Press, 1929.

690 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

per cent believed that there is a continuance of life after death; 62 per
cent believed in the literal resurrection of the body; 61 per cent believed
that a considerable part of the human race will suffer eternal punishment
because of their rejection of Christ; 66 per cent believed that Jesus will
come again to judge all mankind, both living and dead; 60 per cent
believed that death and suffering were brought into the world by the
disobedience of Adam and Eve and that man was originally in a state
of complete moral perfection, which he lost by his disobedience and fall;
64 per cent believed that prayer has the power to change conditions in
nature, such as drought; 83 per cent believed that prayer for others
directly affects their lives whether or not they know that such prayer is
being offered; 94 per cent believed that God now acts upon or operates
in human lives through the agency and person of the Holy Spirit; 47 per
cent believed that the creation of the world occurred in the manner and
time recorded in Genesis; 57 per cent believed that heaven exists as an
actual place or location. These answers clearly show that, when they
are pinned down to specific points, most of the devout modernist minis-
ters stick pretty close to orthodox notions of Christian essentials and
prove that essential orthodoxy is by 110 means "a man of straw" in the
United States, as is so frequently asserted by liberal ministers when
orthodox beliefs are being challenged or attacked.

The replies received from the theological students revealed a consider-
ably greater departure from orthodoxy. For example, whereas 60 per
cent of the ministers declared for the belief in the Devil as an actual
person, only 9 per cent of the theological students took this view.
Whereas 56 per cent of the ministers held that, in biblical times, God
exhibited himself to persons in a manner which no longer occurs, only
13 per cent of the theological students accepted such a statement.
Whereas 55 per cent of the ministers held that the Bible was written by
men chosen and supernaturally endowed by God for that purpose and
by Him given the exact message they were to write, only 8 per cent of
the theological students concurred in this position. Whereas 38 per
cent of the ministers held that the Bible is wholly free from legend or
myth, only 4 per cent of the theological students shared this viewpoint.
Whereas over 50 per cent of the ministers believed that heaven and hell
exist as actual locations, only 11 per cent of the theological students so
believed. Whereas 62 per cent of the ministers believed in the resurrec-
tion of the body, only 18 per cent of the theological students retained this
belief. Whereas 53 per cent of the ministers believed that all men, being
sons of Adam, are born with natures wholly perverse, sinful, and de-
praved, only 13 per cent of the theological students supported this atti-
tude. Whereas 46 per cent of the ministers held that in order to be a
Christian it is necessary and essential to believe in the virgin birth of
Jesus, only 3 per cent of the theological students gave their assent to this
viewpoint.

However, in regard to 11 crucial items out of the 56 in the question-

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 691

naire, more than three quarters of both the ministers and theological
students definitely concurred. We print below these 11 items, with the
percentage of those who gave an affirmative to the propositions advanced:

1. There is a supreme being; God exists. (100%)

3. God is omnipotent. (80%)

4. God's relation to man is that of Father. (98%)

8. God controls the universe through his personal presence and power. (82%)
13. God is a being with personal attributes, complete and perfect in all moral
qualities. (90%)

27. Jesus while on earth Was subject to temptation as arc other men. (97%)

28. Jesus met his problems and difficulties using only those powers and resources

available to all men. (76%)

29. Jesus lived a life on earth without sin. (87%)
39. Life continues after death. (95%)

48. Forgiveness of sin is essential to a right relationship with God. (96%)
52. God operates on human lives through the agency and person of the Holy
Spirit. (91%)

The Advanced Modernists represent a thorough departure from ortho-
dox beliefs. The more conservative members of this group, while com-
pletely rejecting the notion of any divine inspiration of the Bible and the
divinity of Jesus, still retain a shadowy loyalty to Christianity and a
formal belief in the existence of God. Such are the radical wing among
the Congregationalists and the more conservative Unitarians and Univer-
salists.

Any formal connection with Christianity was repudiated by the Ethical
Culture Society founded in 1876 by Felix Adler. The organization did,
however, maintain a respectful attitude toward theism and the teachings
of Jesus. In the vanguard of the Advanced Modernists we find the group
who call themselves Humanists, because they base their doctrines upon
the service of man rather than the worship of God. Most of their
adherents have come from Unitarian and Universalist circles. They take
an agnostic position, neither denying nor affirming the existence of God.
They accept without question even the most disconcerting revelations of
science and scholarship. They view the Bible as surely one of the great
historic works on religion, but one having no greater claim to divine
authorship than the Koran. They not only reject the divinity of Jesus
but accord him no special uniqueness as a human religious teacher. They
have built up a religion solely around man himself, with the aim of utiliz-
ing religion as a means of promoting human well-being here and now.
They frankly reject the idea of personal immortality and any hope or
fear of the future life. The leaders of this movement have been John H.
Dietrich, A. Eustace Haydon, Charles Francis Potter, Curtis W. Reese,
A. C. Dieffenbach, John Haynes Holmes, E. B. Backus, T. C. Abell, Ed-
win H. Wilson, and A. W. Slaten. The Humanist position has been sup-
ported by able philosophers, such as John Dewey, James H. Tufts, J. H,
Leuba, Roy W. Sellers, 0. L. Reiser, Max C. Otto, John Herman Randall,
Durant Drake, and Corliss Lament. Dr. Charles Francis Potter has pro-

692 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

vided us with a ten-point contrast between the views of orthodox Chris-
tianity and those espoused by Humanism :

CHRISTIANITY

God created thn world and man.

Hell is a place of eternal torment for
the wicked.

Heaven is the place where good people
go when they die.

The chief end of man is to glorify God.

Religion has to do with the supernatu-
ral.

Man is inherently evil and a worm of
the dust.

Man should submit to the will of God.

Salvation comes from outside of man.

The ideas of sin, salvation, redemption,
prayer, and worship are important.

The truth is to be found in one religion
only.

HUMANISM

The world and man evolved.

Suffering is the natural result
ing the laws of right living.

Doing right brings its own satisfaction.

The chief end of man is to improve
himself, both as an individual and as a
race.

Religion has to do with the natural.
The so-called supernatural is only the
not-yct-undcrstood natural.

Man is inherently good and has infinite
possibilities.

Man should not submit to injustice or
suffering without protest and should
endeavor to remove its causes.

Improvement comes from within. No
man or god can savo another man.

These ideas are unimportant in re-
ligion.

There are truths in all religions and
outside of religion.

The most extreme deviation from orthodox Christianity is to be found
among the Atheists. They vehemently deny the existence of God and
take a hostile attitude toward all forms of supernatural religion. They
are not, however, necessarily opposed to the effort of the Humanists to
create a social religion devoted to improving the welfare of man here
pn earth. The leaders of American Atheism have been Joseph Lewis and
his Free Thinkers Society, and Charles B. Smith and his American Asso-
ciated for the Advancement of Atheism. The Atheists have few actual
and enthusiastic followers. The many who have become sceptical of all
the tenets of orthodoxy are usually completely indifferent to religion.
They seldom become affiliated with any organizations attacking religion.
They take little interest in either pro-religious or anti-religious activities
and organizations.

There have been certain special religious developments in the United
States in the last century or so, such as the Mormon church, the Salvation
Army, Christian Science, the New Oxford Movement, and the like. The
first three of these groups mentioned above are essentially orthodox in
their religious concepts, the Salvation Army sharing the views of other
Christian Fundamentalists. The New Oxford Movement, which has de-

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 693

veloped mainly since the World War under the leadership of the Rev.
Frank N. D. Buchman, represents a sort of neo-romanticism, laying stress
upon the emotions and the highly personal element in religion and making
an adroit use of the erotic element in religious conversion and religious
association. The social tendencies of the movement are conservative, if
not reactionary.

Approximately one half of all Americans above the age of 13 are not
affiliated with any form of religious organization.

The Conflict of Religion with Modern Science

Much has been written about the conflict between religion and science.
Andrew D. White wrote a very popular and thoughtful work dealing
comprehensively with the history of this important subject.6 There can
be no intelligent discussion of the relation of religion to science unless we
differentiate between the attitudes of the various religious groups dis-
cussed. A complete conflict exists between fundamentalist religion and
modern science, and no conflict whatever between the latter and Human-
ism.

It is obvious that many doctrines of Fundamentalism and other forms
of Christian orthodoxy are contradictory to the teachings of natural and
social science. The orthodox dogmas with respect to the certainty and
personal nature of God, the geocentric theory of the universe, the doc-
trine of a special and recent creation of the universe and everything
therein, the notion that human life exists primarily to secure forgiveness
from sin and a blessed immortality, the certainty of a literal and personal
immortality, and the assurance of a specific heaven and hell are all incom-
patible'with the rudiments of modern science. It is true that orthodoxy
does not forbid activity in certain fields of science, such as geography,
comparative anatomy, botany, and nature study, but it does vigorously
oppose those forms of scientific activity which in any way threaten the
integrity of the Christian epic. For the most part, the orthodox are
entirely ignorant of the more unsettling aspects of contemporary science,
such as astro-physics, relativity, and psychiatry. Hence they have not
actively opposed these developments. They have centered their attack
chiefly upon Biblical scholarship and the doctrine of evolution. Even
these are very incompletely understood by the orthodox.

The tenets of the Devout Modernists indicate that even this group is
fundamentally aligned with beliefs which are incompatible with scientific
discoveries. The more enlightened of the Devout Modernists have made
their peace with certain general phases of nineteenth-century science, but
they have failed to come to grips with the even more unsettling scientific
revelations of the twentieth. For example, they accept the general theory
of evolution, but they have not digested the implications of contemporary
astro-physics. A book like Harlow Shapley's Flights from Chaos offers

6 A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols.,
Appleton-Century, 1896.

694 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

a more sweeping challenge to Christianity than did Darwin's Origin of
Species. Other phases of modern science of which the Devout Modernists
have not taken proper account are the new quantum physics and rela-
tivity, the naturalistic explanation of human conduct provided by scien-
tific psychology, the wholly secular explanation of religious conversion
provided by modern psychiatry, and the sociological interpretation of the
origin and nature of social institutions, moral codes, and human conduct.
In any showdown, the Devout Modernists tend to line up with the Funda-
mentalists and orthodox against the Advanced Modernists. As recently
as 1929, a very liberal and intelligent Devout Modernist, President Henry
Slone Coffin of Union Theological Seminary, called upon all the faithful
to rally and smite Humanism as "the scourge of Christendom." The
comprehensive conflict between Devout Modernism and the attitudes and
revelations of twentieth-century science have been well stated by John
Herman Randall:

In the light of the present situation, we can see that -the 19th century philoso*
phies and liberal theologies made no real adjustment to the spirit of science.
They were rebelling, with the idealistic thinkers of the Romantic era, against the
narrowness and dogmatism of Newtonian science; they naturally sought further
truth in another realm by another method. Even when they welcomed evolu-
tion, they never saw the real implications of its insistence on man's biological
setting in a natural environment; they made of it another Romantic faith, with
no comprehension of what it ultimately meant. They never really absorbed the
spirit of science.

This whole intellectual attitude and apparatus of liberal religious thinking, still
dominant, with few exceptions, in modernist circles, is irrelevant today. It is
irrelevant intellectually, because contemporary philosophical thinking has passed
beyond idealism, has passed beyond creative evolution, has passed beyond the will
to believe. Thinkers today are no longer escaping from Newtonian science; they
have transformed the harsh mechanism of the 19tn century into a scientific world
that has a place for ah1 the levels of human experience, and concepts for dealing
with them intellectually. Philosophers are today exploring the implications of
man's biological experience, of the new physics, of the new sciences of man. The
present generation has seen new philosophies that base themselves frankly on an
acceptance of the scientific spirit and method, supersede the older idealism and
evolutionary faiths. For the most part, liberal religious leaders are still offering
to men whose intellectual techniques have thus changed, a religious attitude and
a philosophical interpretation of the religious life a hundred years out of date.

This attitude is still suspicious of science. It endeavors to limit its scope, to
set bounds to the realm where its methods will apply. There must be truths
beyond science, approaches to reality that will discover, not only values and
meanings, but facts and descriptions, where scientific verification is impotent.
Liberals have pared away their faith in a supernatural governance of the world
until less and less is left; like the young woman who produced a baby with no
apparent father, they apologize that it is after all a very little baby. They are
still afraid to accept the modern scientific philosophies that frankly acknowledge
the implications of biology, psychology, anthropology, and physics, that above all
welcome the tentative and investigating spirit of scientific thinking. Philosophers
have worked out a naturalistic interpretation of experience that gives full scope
to all the verifiable needs of the moral and spiritual life. Religious leaders are
still ignorant of what has been accomplished, or are afraid to follow.

Moreover, the moral optimism of religious liberalism, its individualism, its
reliance on the divinity of man and nature, is a weak weapon with which to face

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 695

the ethical demands of modern society. It insists on the comfortable reality of
God and Heaven, but it shrinks from the harder facts of the Devil and Hell. It
is apt to assume complacently that all is right with the world, and to gloss over
the disagreeable call to make it better. It lends itself far more easily to the
smug middle-class worship of prosperity than to the vital religious impulses at
the basis of our humanitarian and social faiths. . .

Judged, therefore, in the light of present intellectual and social needs, it can
hardly be said that the mediating compromise of liberal religion in recent times
has been as successful as the great historic reconstructions of the past. Most
modernist leaders are still thinking in terms that are irrelevant to the serious
thought of today; they are merely acquiescing in the passing social and moral
ideals of the day, with little attempt at illuminating criticism. It is apparent to
the sympathetic observer that such religious thought and life is still serving well
those who have in their own lives broken from rigid orthodoxy. But it is equally
apparent that present-day modernism must undergo great transformations before
it can hope to satisfy the religious needs of our civilization.7

Many friends of conventional religion have taken heart of late because
certain eminent scientists have assumed the role of liberal theologians.
Among the best known have been the English mathematician, Alfred N.
Whitehcad, the able English astro-physicist, Arthur S. Eddington, the
eminent British biologist, the late J. Arthur Thomson, the brilliant Ameri-
can physicists, Robert A. Millikan and the late Michael I. Pupin, the
prominent zoologist, the late Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the Harvard
geologist, Kirtley F. Mather. These men, and many others of their kind,
have valiantly proclaimed that there is no conflict between science and
religion. A particularly confident expression of this point of view was
set forth by the late Professor M. I. Pupin:

Science is making us better Christians.

Science teaches us that the Universe is guided by an intelligent Divinity.

Science is teaching men how to cooperate intelligently with God; it is teaching
men what his laws are and how to obey them.

Science is proving that the human soul is the greatest thing in the Universe; the
supreme purpose of the Creator.

Science is leading us closer and closer to God.

Science has made us better homes and is teaching us how to make a better de-
mocracy and a better social life ; it is thus preparing us for the greatest spiritual,
artistic and intellectual life that men have ever known.

Science does not contradict belief in the immortality of the human soul.

Science is revealing God in greater and greater glory, and teaches us that in
time we may possibly even see Him face to face . . .

President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, is reported to have
said recently that, while talking with Dr. Pupin, he felt that he was witnessing the
curtain being lifted upon a new and brighter world : "I believe he would make you
feel the same way, and I should like to convey that feeling to you through his own
words." 8

It is usually assumed that these scientists speak with as much authority
upon religion as they do upon science. But James Harvey Robinson has
suggested that their views on religion are nothing more than a hangover

7 Randall, op. cit., pp. 124-126.

8 Cited by A. E. Wjgga,m, Exploring Your Mind with the Psychologists, Bobbs
Merrill, 1930, pp. 38^-386.

696 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

of their youthful impressions, which they share with William Jennings
Bryan and Billy Sunday:

Bryan exhibited through his life no more knowledge of religious matters than
he could have easily acquired at ten years of age. Sermons of the commoner sort
contain only what both preacher and audience accepted before they were grown
up. Religion does not tend to mature in most cases. It is what we learned at
our mother's knee. In later life we are preoccupied with business and amuse-
ment, and there is no time to keep up with the course of religious investigation,
even if we had the slightest disposition to do so. Billy Sunday talks as a big
husky boy to other boys and girls. Even distinguished scientific men solemnly
diHCMiss the relation of religion to science, when, if they but stopped to think, they
would find that they were assuming that they know all about religion, without
having given it much thought since childhood; although they would readily
admit that after a lifetime's work they knew very little about science.9

The essential innocence of these apologetic scientists with respect to the
bearing of scientific discoveries upon religion has been forcefully stated by
John Herman Randall, Jr.:

It is true that many physicists have recently blossomed forth as liberal theo-
logians. Aware that modern physics has abandoned doctrines that were once
hostile to religious claims, they imagine that there is no further conflict between
religion and science. But they are abysmally ignorant of all that anthropology
and psychology have discovered about the nature of religion itself. They are
ignorant of the serious philosophies that have built upon such ^ data. They do
not realize that the present conflict of religious faith with science is no longer with
a scientific explanation of the world, but with a scientific explanation of religion.
The really revolutionary effect of the scientific faith on religion today is not its
new view of the universe, but its .new view of religion. Reinterpretations of
religious belief have been unimportant compared with reinterpreta^ions of religion
itself. For those who share them, it has become impossible to view religion as a
divine revelation entrusted to man. It has even become impossible to see it as
a relation between man and a cosmic deity. Religion has rather appeared a
human enterprise, an organization of human life, an experience, a social bond and
an aspiration.10

Moreover, when one of these scientific reconcilers gives thoughtful
attention to religion, it is usually found that he does not have in mind
orthodoxy but some abstruse form of philosophical contemplation. A. N.
Whitehead has frequently been held up as one of the eminent scientists
who support contemporary religion. But we actually find that few
Atheists have been more severe in their judgment of orthodoxy than has
Professor Whitehead. This will appear from his characterization of the
religions of the past, including historical Christianity:

History, down to the present day, is a melancholy record of the horrors which
can attend religion: human sacrifice, and in particular the slaughter of children,
cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the
maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at its charge.
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.11

» The Human Comedy, Harper, 1937,' pp. 318-319.

1° J. H. Randall, Jr., in Current History, June, 1929, p. 360.

11 Religion in the Making, Macmillan, 1926.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 697

The fundamental incompatibility between all forms of conventional
religion and the methods and attitudes of natural science has been effec-
tively stated by Clifford Kirkpatrick:

It should be noted that it is rather the method and philosophy of science than
science itself which is incompatible with religion, although the facts of science
certainly contradict the belief phase of most religions, especially the Hebrew-
Babylonian account of creation and cosmology. Science rests upon certain prac-
tical and useful philosophical assumptions and as a rule develops through the
efforts of men using certain methods and entertaining certain attitudes. These
assumptions, methods, and attitudes are so closely associated with the conceptual
system of science itself that the whole sociologically, if not logically, constitutes a
single culture pattern. Let us examine some of the contrasts between religion
and this culture pattern formed by the union of naturalistic philosophy, the
scientific method, and the body of science.

( 1 ) Science is nourished by the active use of the scientific method involving
observation, experimentation, induction, deduction, and verification. Religion
rests upon passive faith.

(2) Science is based upon the principle of induction which is the assumption
that a repetition of events implies a further repetition of these events. Further-
more, in spite of the scepticism of Hume and his follower, Pearson, scientists
usually assume an external reality organized in an orderly manner. In brief,
science is associated with a philosophy of determinism, the assumption that there
are no uncaused phenomena, that given a certain set of conditions a certain
result must inevitably follow. Religion, on the other hand, commonly if not
invariably implies the existence of powers which interfere by miracle and revela-
tion with the laws of the universe.

(3) Science recognizes no personal powers in the universe responsive to the
prayers and needs of men. Belief in mysterious powers which constitutes, ac-
cording to our definition, the conceptual aspect of religion is usually an animistic
belief in personal powers. Science in effect denies the existence of spiritual beings
which religion affirms.

(4) Science is critical and agnostic while religion is credulous. The scientist
accepts nothing save proven existential facts of fruitful hypotheses, while for the
conventionally religious person faith is a virtue and doubt a vice.

(5) Science is based upon disciplined thought which demands exact definitions
and precise terms as well as a logical manipulation of concepts. Religion makes
use of vague symbolism and of terms which are suffused with emotion and serve
as a means of communicating feeling rather than an intellectual currency.

(6) Science deals only with observations, that is to say, existential facts and
their relationships rather than with judgments or values. Religion, on the other
hand, in common with philosophy, deals with values. Dean Inge would deny this
point, claiming that the attributes of ultimate reality are values and that even
science is based on such values as coherence, uniformity and commensurability.
As has been previously pointed out, culture patterns such as that of religion
merge into one another and yet there is a difference of no small degree between
science and religion in this respect.

(7) Science represses rationalization, wishful thinking and the various forms
of bias, while religion gives expression to such attitudes and modes of thought.

(8) The thought content of science is dynamic, ever changing in the direction
of new harmonies. Religious belief tends to harden into dogma and to remain
static even in the face of changing conditions.

(9) In its emotional aspects likewise, the naturalistic-scientific culture pattern
stands contrasted to that of religion. With scientific achievement there comes
an expansion of the ego, a sense of triumph at having wrested from nature some
of her cherished secrets. It is true that Newton pictured himself as a child pick-
ing up the brighter pebbles along the shores of the vast ocean of truth, and

698 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

scientists of a mystical turn of mind have entered into humble communion with
nature. Nevertheless, in religion there tends to be a greater contraction of the
ego and reverence passes readily to awe, self-abasement, a feeling of loss of person-
ality and of absolute dependence. One might venture a guess that scientists tend
to the extrovert, and the religiously-minded to the introvert type, but this is mere
speculation with vague terms.

(10) The scientist while aware of the wondrous in the universe is inclined to
deny the existence of mystery and seeks to remove it in so far as possible by
research. Religion on the other hand is bathed in mystery which it often
cherishes for its own sake.

(11) In regard to overt behavior as well as thought and feeling, science stands
in contrast to religion. The scientist moving calmly among the instruments of his
laboratory hardly reminds one of a participant in a Saturnalian orgy or even of
the priest presiding over the miracle of transubstaritiation. Ritual, on the other
hand, deals with objects arid processes stooped in emotional value. Even if the
ritual be lifeless and devoid of its original emotional appeal it still stands con-
trasted to scientific procedure in that it is stereotyped and formal, while experi-
mental methods are ever changing in response to the new problems on the fron-
tier of knowledge.

If it be objected that those contrasts do not mean incompatibility, since science
and religion huve coexisted and scientists have boon religious, it is necessary to
define the term incompatibility more closely. Within the individual personality
two patterns of thought, feeling and overt behavior are incompatible when there
is mental conflict and reciprocal modification of the systems under conditions in
which the patterns are not dissociated or compartmentalized one from another.
If the biologist who is an evolutionist, a mechanist and a thoroughgoing deter-
minist in his laboratory is, while in church, a believer in special creation, the
Virgin Birth, miracles and bodily resurrection of the dead, it is only because two
aspects of his personality arc separated. If brought into contact in the course of
discussion or during preparation of a statement of his views, a reorganization
would be necessary.12

There is little possibility for conflict between Advanced Modernism
and science, particularly between Humanism and science, because Hu-
manists frankly base their religion upon the findings of contemporary sci-
ence, especially those phases of science which deal most directly with
man. Occasionally, an Advanced Modernist exhibits a certain yearning
for the doctrine of free will, but, in general, this group has brought its
thought thoroughly into keeping with scientific attitudes and discoveries.
However, the Advanced Modernists are numerically only the merest drop
in the bucket when compared with the more than 54 millions listed as re-
ligious believers and church communicants in the United States. There
are, for example, only a little over 60,000 Unitarians in the country.
There are about 55,000 Universalists, so that it is probable that there
are not more than 150,000 church-going Advanced Modernists in the
country as a whole, to make a very liberal estimate.

Therefore, it is apparent that there is a marked conflict between science
and the religious beliefs of the overwhelming majority of religious com-
municants in the United States today. Except in the case of the militant
Fundamentalists and certain of the more aggressive of the Catholic group,

12 Reprinted by permission from Religion in Human Affairs, by C. Kirkpatrick,
published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1929, pp. 469-472.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 699

however, this conflict between religion and science does not normally
take the form of vigorous practical opposition to scientific activities.
Scientists are rarely openly persecuted for their beliefs today. Herein
lies the great difference between our age and the previous millennium or
more. However, the scholars who attempt to popularize modern scien-
tific notions or to show their implications for religion and ethics are in
danger of dismissal from many institutions of learning and of exclusion
from many others. The promulgation of scientific views in the public
schools is still highly precarious when they touch upon human and social
problems. Exposition of the implications of the biological, psychologi-
cal, and social sciences is far more hazardous than the teaching of the
physical sciences. The latter are almost immune from religious interfer-
ence in the United States today.

A common rationalization by the timid and evasive among both re-
ligionists and scientists is the assertion that there is no real conflict
between science and religion ; whatever conflict there is lies between sci-
ence and theology. This is akin to saying that while there is no conflict
between religion and medicine, there may be a conflict between religion
and surgery. As we have made clear earlier in this chapter, one cannot
separate religion from theology. Theology is the conceptual or intellec-
tual side of religion, that which formulates the ideas underlying and
rationalizing religious practices. It is obvious that science, as a body
of intellectual concepts, is most likely to contact, and come into conflict
with religion through the field of theology. Any conflict between science
and theology is necessarily a conflict between science and religion.

The Humanizing of Religion

One of the most commendable religious developments in recent times
has been the growing concern of religion with the well-being of man here
on earth. As we have noted, the Humanists are solely interested in this
phase of religious activity. But those groups primarily concerned with
the soul of man and his destiny in the future life are also showing an
increasing interest in the improvement of human conditions here on earth.
An epoch-making event in the history of Catholic policy came in 1891
when Pope Leo XIII issued his famous encyclical, Rcrum Novarum,
expressing solicitude for the welfare of labor. The Catholic Social Wel-
fare Council, led by Father John A. Ryan, has taken an active part in
supporting progressive social legislation in the United States. Certain
Catholic leaders have, however, placed religious strategy ahead of human
welfare as is evidenced by the opposition of powerful members of the
Catholic hierarchy to the pending child labor amendment. Indeed, even
Father Ryan has made it clear that when the dogmas of the Church con-
flict with social reform movements as, for instance, with birth-control, the
former take precedence.

Among the Protestants, the Methodist denomination has, of late, shown
a special concern with the relief of poverty and such changes in the eco-
nomic order as are necessary to increase the income of the masses and to

700 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

lessen unemployment. Bishop Francis J. McConnell has been an out-
standing leader in this movement. He was the chief bulwark standing
behind the famous Report on the Steel Strike of 1919 y made by the Inter-
church World Movement. But the power of reactionary economic forces
over American religion was made evident through the fact that, after this
report was made, the Inter-church World Movement was broken up.

A number of leaders in social reform have concluded that organized
Christianity is fundamentally opposed to social change and social better-
ment. Hence they propose to appeal over the head of organized Chris-
tianity to what they believe to be the revolutionary teachings of Jesus.
The leaders of this group are such men as Kirby Page, Sherwood Eddy,
Harry Ward, Jerome Davis, Charles Ellwood, S. Ralph Harlow and
David D. Vaughan. The most aggressive figure in this movement is
Sherwood Eddy, who thus summarizes his program:

Believing in Jesus' way of life and in his all-inclusive principle of love as the full
sharing of life, I therefore determine to apply this principle in all the relationships
of life:

(1) To live simply and sacrificially, avoiding waste and luxury. To make the
purpose of my life the making of men rather than the making of money. Not
to grow rich in a poor world by laying up treasures for myself but to share all
with my fellow men. To apply the golden rule in all my relationships.

(2) To practice brotherhood toward all. To remember that every human
being is a person of infinite worth, deserving the fullest opportunity for self-
development. To participate in no secret order or fraternity if it tends to exclu-
siveness, prejudice or strife. To seek justice for every man without distinction
of caste or color.

(3) To make peace where there is strife; to seek to outlaw war, "the world's
chief collective sin/' as piracy and slavery have already been outlawed, substitut-
ing a positive program of international justice and good will.

(4) To redeem the social order; to test its evils by the principle of love and
fearlessly to challenge them as Jesus challenged the money-changers in the tem-
ple. To endeavor to replace them by the constructive building of a new social
order, the Kingdom of God on earth. If a student, to apply this purpose im-
mediately to the problems of our campus; to seek education as training for service
rather than the mere enjoyment of privilege, the attainment of grades or the
achievement of cheap "success"; to tolerate no dishonest practices in classroom,
athletics or college elections; to maintain no relationships with my fellows, men
or women, which violate absolute purity or debase the divine value of personality.
Since I realize my inability to achieve this way of life unaided :

(5) To seek a new discovery of God which will release within my life new
springs of power such as men in the past have experienced when they rediscov-
ered the religion of Jesus.

A still more liberal view of religion heartily approves such a program
of social betterment, but criticizes its sponsors for insisting that it must
be inspired by the teachings of Jesus. This point was made very effec-
tively by Paul Blanshard, in commenting upon the attitude of Harry F.
Ward:

What I object to in his treatment is the constant dragging in of "the ethic
of Jesus." Is it necessary for a professor in a theological seminary to pretend
that a sound economic morality must come from Jesus? Anyone who reads the
Gospels with an impartial eye will discover that Jesus's teaching concerning eco-

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 701

nomic values was confused, fragmentary, and quite inapplicable to a world of
tickers, billionaires, and communists. What Mr. Ward really means by the
"ethic of Jesus" is the ethic of Harry F. Ward, and I don't see why he should
be so modest about saying so.13

The Humanists go the whole way in humanizing religion and declare
it unnecessary to appeal to Jesus to justify a program of social reform,
designed to improve the earthly well-being of man. They believe in the
supreme worth of man, and hold that better social conditions are justified
by the beneficent effect upon man himself. This attitude of Humanism
has been summarized by John H. Dietrich:

1. Humanism believes in the supreme worth of human life, and that man there-
fore must be treated as an end, not as a means to some other end. Man is the
highest product of the creative process which conies within our knowledge, and
therefore Humanism recognizes nothing which commands a higher allegiance. . . .

2. Humanism is the effort to understand human experience by means of human
inquiry. This stands in direct contrast to the method of the older religions, which
is known as revelation. . . .

3. Humanism is the effort to enrich human experience to the utmost capacity
of man and of his environment; that is, the primary concern of Humanism is
human development. It has no blind faith in the perfectibility of man, but it
believes that his present condition can be immeasurably improved. . . .

4. Humanism accepts the responsibility for the conditions of human life and
relies entirely upon human effort for their improvement. The Humanist makes
no attempt to shove the responsibility for the present miserable conditions of
human life onto some God or some cosmic order. He fully realizes that the situ-
ation is in our own hands, and that practically all the evils of the world have been
brought upon men by themselves. . . .

5. He frankly assumes the responsibility for the way in which our social life
is regulated, and knows that if such flagrant and horrible miscarriages of justice
as we have recently witnessed are to be avoided, man himself must create the
machinery.14

The Humanists courageously advocate specific measures which they
believe are essential to the creation of a civilized social order. As good
a statement of these as any is set forth by Charles Francis Potter:

1. The cultivation of international and inter-racial amity.

2. The legalizing of birth control.

3. The improvement and extension of education.

4. The raising of cultural standards.

5. 'The correlation of cultural agencies.

6. The defense of freedom of speech.

7. The encouragement of art, music, drama, the dance, and all other means of
self-expression.

8. The elevation of the ethical standards of moving pictures.

9. The promotion of public health.

10. The checking of standardization ia cases where it injures the individual.

11. The improvement of methods of dealing with criminals.

12. The improvement of means of communication.

13. The abolition of religious subsidies.

14. The improvement of industrial conditions.

15. The extension of social insurance.

" The Nation, July 10, 1929.

14 "The Advance of Humanism," Sermon, privately printed, October, 1927.

702 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

16. The establishment of full sex equality.

17. The extension of child welfare measures.

18. The purification of politics.

19. The abolition of special privilege.

20. The conservation of natural resources for the people.

21. The substitution of temperance for prohibition.15

Religion has never been primarily interested in the welfare of man.
It has relied almost exclusively upon supernatural power, and, since the
rise of Christianity, it has been chiefly concerned with the future life.
Humanism repudiates the slightest thought of supernatural assistance and
is entirely concerned with bettering human conditions here and now. It
is, however, a real question whether so rational a religion, divorced from
the supernatural, can sufficiently grip the imagination of man to gain
many followers.

Some students of religion believe that, if we ever have any popular
secular religions in the future, they will take the form of Fascism and
Communism, which are organized for mass emotional appeal. Fascism
and Communism have shown many similarities to the older religions.
Communism has its Trinity — with Marx, the Father; Lenin, the Son; and
Stalin, the Holy Ghost — its sacred places, its saints and especially sanc-
tified groups or classes, and a dogmatic (Marxian) philosophy of history
comparable to the Christian Epic. The Nazis have deified Hitler, made
saints of the men killed in the party's struggle for power, and revived the
ancient Aryan mythology, in conjunction with their secular program and
propaganda.

The Role of Religion and the Church in
Modern Life

It follows, as a matter of course, that the great changes brought about
in the intellectual status of orthodox religion and Devout Modernism by
science and critical thought make it desirable to reexamine the place of
religion and the function of the church in contemporary society.

In the first place, it is evident that the clergyman can no longer pre-
'tend to be a competent expert in the way of discovering the nature, will,
and operations of any possible cosmic God. The theologian, at best, can
be only a competent second- or third-hand interpreter of the facts and
implications about the cosmos and its laws gathered by specialists in
science and philosophy. In the old days, when it was thought that God
might be reached and understood through prayer, sacrifice, or revelation,
the clergyman or theologian was indeed the "man of God" who could
make clear the will of the Deity to believers. But now, when God must
be sought in terms of the findings of the test-tube, the compound micro-
scope, the interferometer, the radium tube, and Einstein's equations, the
average clergyman is hopelessly out of place in the search. Therefore,

15 Humanism, a New Religion, Simon and Schuster, 1930, pp. 124-125.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 703

the intelligent and educated theologians must surrender their age-long
pretension to special, if not unique, competence in clearing up the problem
of the nature of God and His laws. They can, at best, be little more than
ringside spectators of the observatory and the laboratory.

We may concede the contention that theology is a very important phase
of religion, but we can scarcely admit that there is today any function
for the independent and sovereign theologian. The presentation of "or-
derly and systematic ideas about religion" must now be looked upon as
the province of the social scientist and social philosopher.

Next to the revelation of the nature of God and His ways, the most
honored function of the minister has been to unravel God's will with
respect to human conduct. He then could indicate the absolute principles
which should guide personal morality, in order that the soul of the indi-
vidual might be assured of an ultimate refuge in the New Jerusalem.
This was a perfectly rational and logical function for religion when it was
commonly assumed: (l)'that the purpose of moral conduct is to insure
the salvation of the soul, and (2) that the supreme and complete guide to
moral living is to be discovered in Holy Scriptures.

There seems to be no ground whatever for the orthodox views of a
bodily or spiritual immortality and the imminence of a literal heaven and
hell. Hence the basic objective of right living can no longer be regarded
as the assurance of spiritual salvation. On the contrary, the scientists'
discoveries have shown that the fundamental purpose of the good life is
to secure the maximum amount of happiness for the greatest possible
number here upon this earth.

Extensive research has shown the Bible to be not a series of divine reve-
lations but a historical record of an evolving culture. It is plain, there-
fore, that accurate guidance to the good life in our complex society cannot
be sought in the Scriptures or provided by specialists in Holy Writ. The
moral code of the future must be supplied by the specialists in mundane
happiness, namely, biologists, physiologists, psychiatrists, educators, so-
cial scientists, and the students and practitioners of esthetics.

Some who frankly admit the incompetence of the clergyman and the
theologian in the way of providing original and conclusive guidance to the
best conduct for a happy life on earth contend, nevertheless, that religion
can exercise a very valuable service in interpreting and popularizing
the findings of scientific specialists. This may be true, to a certain ex-
tent, but many qualifications would have to be noted. Many phases of
guidance to complete human happiness would necessarily be a highly
technical and individual matter, to be handled by medical and other ex-
perts in relation to individual cases and problems, and would scarcely be
adapted to comprehensive general interpretation or exhortation.

A case can be made for the service which may be rendered by religion
in inculcating an interest in, and respect for, such broad and scarcely
debatable moral conceptions as justice, honesty, pacifism, cooperation,
kindliness, and beauty. Kirsopp Lake has stated the case for the desira-
bility of having religion relinquish interest in sumptuary moral control

704 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

and assume responsibility for the advancement of more profound and gen-
eral moral principles:

One man may find much comfort in tobacco, while another may injure himself
by smoking; one may err by playing too much, and another by never playing at
all. I doubt whether the men of tomorrow will try to interfere with each other
on these points, knowing that the thing which matters is ability to do good work,
and that one man can do his best work in one way, another otherwise. Many of
the things Puritans condemn are strictly indifferent. The religion of tomorrow
will recognize this, it will give good advice to individuals, but not lay down general
rules for universal observance.

On the other hand, it may have a sterner standard in business, industry and
finance. It may insist more loudly that honesty applies to the spirit of business,
not merely to its letter. It may even demand that men must be as trustworthy
in advertisements, business announcements and journalistic reporting as they are
in private affairs. For those are the questions of morals which are the issues
of life and death for the future. They are not covered by the teaching of Jesus
or of historic Christianity, for neither ever discussed problems which did not exist
in their time. Some of the principles which have been laid down by them will
play a part in the solution of these problems but probably others will also be
needed, certainly the actual solutions will contain new elements, and the religion
of tomorrow will have to look for them.18

However, it can scarcely be expected that the custodians of the modern
order, who provide the chief pecuniary support for our religious institu-
tions and organizations, will contribute with enthusiasm to a movement
designed to cut at the root of many business principles and practices
which they hold indispensablQ for the creation of wealth and power. Be-
fore religion could achieve much, it would be necessary to carry on a very
positive program of education in the principles of social ethics, broadly
conceived. Thus far, however, few clergymen so motivated have been
able to maintain their ecclesiastical position long enough to make much
headway. So far as the writer is aware, there has been no organized effort
to draft the services of such men as Sherwood Eddy, Norman Thomas,
Kirby Page, Bouck White, Jerome Davis, Ralph Harlow, Harry Ward,
or David D. Vaughan and to induct them into the pastorates of great
metropolitan churches.

The supervision of religion over recreation, which has, in the past, been
exercised chiefly in making arbitrary decisions as to what are immoral
and what are moral forms of recreation, and in closely scrutinizing and
controlling the activities of individuals in these fields, must now be chal-
lenged. The orthodox religious criteria as to moral and immoral forms
of recreation were not based upon physiological, psychological, or social
grounds, but upon theological considerations which have little or no valid-
ity in the light of modern knowledge. Religion, having no direct compe-
tence in the matter of determining the nature of moral and immoral
conduct in the light of modern secularism, obviously cannot apply its
decisions in this field to the realm of recreation. Recreation, like moral-
ity, with which it has been so closely associated in the past, is a field for

16 The Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow, Houghton Mifflin, 1925, p. 173.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 705

the secular expert and must be handed over to biologists, medical experts,
psychologists, social scientists and esthetes. Religion, at most, could
scarcely go further than to proclaim the general desirability of healthy
and adequate exercise and the exhibition of a proper spirit of good sports-
manship.

Another function of religion in the past which has received much sup-
port relates to its esthetic services. It is held that the ritual, pageantry,
and liturgy of the church provide a relatively economical and highly valu-
able esthetic service to the community. This is, of course, an argument
which can be far better justified from the Catholic standpoint than from
the Protestant, as the Protestant churches have given up most of the
splendor of the Catholic service. This argument boils down to the allega-
tion that the church is in a position to "put on a better show" for the price
than any comparable secular organization. While there was much to be
said in support of this view in regard to the services of the church in
earlier periods, this function may be, and indeed is, achieved more ade-
quately by various secular enterprises, such as the opera, the theatre, the
movies, the art museums, various types of public pageantry, and com-
munity art activities. Further, many contend that the attitude of fear,
awe, and solemnity generated by religious ritual and pageantry produces
a fundamentally unhealthy state of mind which, to a large degree, offsets
the esthetic service contributed thereby.

An interesting interpretation of the function of religion has been set
forth by John Cowper Powys. He believes that religion enables the
sceptic to attain a poetic contemplation of the great illusions of humanity.
This certainly constitutes a noble and dignified statement of the case for
religion, 'and there are doubtless many who find that religion, thus con-
ceived, gives life a deeper and richer content. Yet one can scarcely im-
agine that this view of religion will give satisfaction to any large number
of individuals. Not one person in a thousand who approach religion
from a sentimental viewpoint can attain Mr. Powys' scepticism. On the
other hand, few who are as sceptical as Mr. Powys are capable of a senti-
mental attitude toward religion. Further, if one believes that religion
should be the dynamic basis of effective social reform, Mr. Powys' nega-
tivistic conception of religion is completely unadapted to fulfilling this
function.

It would seem definitely established that the conventional functions of
traditional religion have nearly evaporated in the light of contemporary
knowledge and intellectual attitudes. The theologian is no longer needed
to chart out and control the supernatural world and supernatural powers,
inasmuch as the existence of such entities can scarcely be established.
Further, the theologian cannot by himself locate, describe, or interpret
the new cosmic God believed to be implied in the discoveries of modern
science. Neither can the theologian supply detailed moral guidance in
indicating how man must live to achieve maximum happiness here on
earth. Nor can the church support its ancient pretensions to guiding and
controlling recreation or in supplying popular pageantry. This raises the

706 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

important question as to what religion can legitimately engage upon, in
harmony with the tenets of an open-minded and contemporaneous secular
attitude.

The most reasonable field for the operation of religion in contemporary
society seems to lie in providing for the mass organization of the group
sentiment of mankind in support of the larger principles of kindliness,
sympathy, right, justice, honesty, decency and beauty. Just what con-
stitute the essentials of right, justice, and so on, would have to be deter-
mined by the appropriate scientific and esthetic experts. These experts,
however, have little potency or opportunity in arousing ardent popular
support for their findings. Religion has, thus far, been the most powerful
agency in stirring and directing the collective will of mankind. There-
fore, we may probably contend with safety that the function of a liberal-
ized religion, divested of its archaic supernaturalism, would be to serve
as the public propaganda adjunct of social science and esthetics. The
social sciences and esthetics would supply specific guidance as to what
ought to be done; religion would produce the emotional motive power
essential to the translation of abstract theory into practical action.
There would, however, be ever present the problem of restraining this
educational propaganda to keep it in thorough conformity with the recom-
mendations of science and art. The function of religion, then, would be
to organize the mass mind and group activities in such a fashion as to
benefit secular society and not to please God as he has been understood
and expounded in the orthodox religions of the past.

To the author the problem is whether religion can successfully carry out
the foregoing social service. The issue is primarily one of whether an
organization hitherto almost exclusively devoted to the understanding,
control, and exploitation of the supernatural world can be completely
transformed into an institution devoted entirely to the task of increasing
the secular happiness of mankind here on earth. Such a transformation
would imply a complete revolution in the premises and activities of
religion. The question is, fundamentally, whether religion organized on a
large scale can exist without a sense of mystery and a fear of the unknown.
The thrill of the mysterious has been the core of all organized religions
in the past. We have nothing to give us any convincing assurance that
religion can persist without this dominating element of mystery and fear.
Confucianism is often listed as an exception to this rule, but Confucianism
is really a sublime ethical philosophy, not an emotional mass religion.

Certain writers contend that there will always remain a certain fringe
of mystery in the way of unsolved problems, as well as the general mys-
tery inherent in the riddle of the universe. Yet, as Professor Shotwell has
well indicated in his Religious Revolution of Today, the mysteries of
modern science are quite different in their premises, manifestations, and
psychic effects from the conventional religious mystery, based upon an
emotional reaction to a hypothetical supernatural world. The reaction to
the mysteries of science does not promote that group-forming tendency
which Lester F. Ward, Hankins, Durkheim, and others have shown to be

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 707

so characteristic an effect of supernatural religion. Abstruse scientific
perplexities and the riddle of the universe may promote complex forms of
cerebral effort, but they are not likely to evoke a sentimental thrill or to
generate a crusading passion in human assemblages.

Indeed, some leading_social scientists contend that the divergence be-
tween the old supernaturalism and the new secular program is so great
that no real common ground jpanjbe^ found. Hence they argue that wei
should not contaminate the new secular type of ethical enterprise by
calling it religion. This is certainly a consideration entitled to receive
serious thought. The chief defense for the application of the term reli-
gion to the secular program is that it will soften the shock of the transition
if we preserve the older terminology. Whether or not this justifies the
retention of the term religion for a conception different from its usual
connotation, the writer will not assume to say. Another argument for
preserving the religious terminology is that we should thereby be able to
make use of existing ecclesiastical organization and equipment. How-
ever, existing religious institutions may be so attached to outworn con-
ceptions and practices as to make them more of a liability than an asset
to religious reconstruction. Those who have surrendered traditional
notions of religion and yet are unwilling to admit that religion must
become the inspirational basis of social ethics generally display confused
thinking. They tend to flounder hopelessly in search of a hypothetical
area for religious activity, intermediate between adjustment to the super-
natural world and the betterment of human society. Such confusion has
particularly been the bane of the more radical wing of the Devout Mod-
ernists. The recent writings of Reinhold Niebuhr are probably the most
conspicuous example of this confusion and logical contradiction in Devout
Modernist theology.

Many believe that religion, of whatever variety, is bound to pass away
and that its place will be taken by various secular cults organized about
some particular social and economic program; in short, that religion will
be supplanted by devotion to the ideals of capitalism (through Rotary,
Kiwanis, and other Service Clubs), Fascism, Communism, Socialism,
Anarchism, and so on. These secular programs may have the power to
enlist that group-forming tendency and to invoke those group loyalties
which Hankins, Ward, Durkheim, and others look upon as the essential
core of religion. Many of the Russians, for example, seem to have found
as much satisfaction in devotion to the Bolshevist principles as they
formerly did in subservience to the dogmas of the Greek Catholic church.
We can only say, in this regard, that time alone will tell whether socio-
economic dogmas and cults will usurp the position formerly occupied by
religion.

In his extremely interesting work on Religion Coming of Age, Roy W.
Sellars adopts a thoroughly secular and critical point of view, which will
commend his book to all emancipated intellects. He concludes, however,
that we must stand with the existing churches and attempt to achieve
religious reconstruction, moral reform, and social progress through these

708 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

present-day ecclesiastical organizations and institutions. Though he
does not attempt to defend the existing creeds and sectarian divisions of
the Christian Church, his theory raises the very interesting question as to
whether a truly contemporaneously-minded person can stand by the
churches even if he desires to do so. We may admit the potential value
of exploiting the existing resources in the way of ecclesiastical equipment
and running machinery, but it is a moot question as to whether we can
win over such resources to the cause and service of the new rational
religion. Adjustments of this sort, at any rate, call for a degree of com-
promise that is usually destructive to intellectual integrity and the con-
sistent maintenance of a thoroughly up-to-date attitude. Some of our
greatest Modernist preachers are compelled to stultify their theology and
repress their innate liberalism, in order to make a working success of their
church and pastoral duties.

In the former agrarian age, the church was the center of community
life and of much social recreation. It could rely not only upon the fear
of the unknown but also upon man's craving for sociability. The rise
of urban life has substituted other forms of social outlet for those the
church formerly supplied. As a result, instead of being indispensable to
the social life of man, the church has become today very largely an irk-
some distraction from his other social obligations and recreational inter-
ests. This matter has been handled very intelligently and lucidly in
Walter Lippmann's notable book, A Preface to Morals.*7 There is little
doubt that the automobile and radio have, in various ways, been more
effective in undermining the old religious morality than all the preachings
and writings of sceptics and Modernists. The disintegrating influence of
these new secular interests is especially deadly and effective because of
its indirect nature. John Herman Randall, Jr., in Current History has
given us an illuminating summary of the effect of these new secular
interests upon the old religion:

Yet industrialism and city life have been far more subversive than all the scien-
tific theories put together. We are all too familiar with theological difficulties.
We are apt to overlook the real religious revolution of the past forty years, the
crowding of religion into a minor place by the host of secular faiths and interests.
For every man alienated from the Church by scientific ideas, there are dozens
dissatisfied with its social attitudes, and hundreds who, with no intellectual
doubts, have found their lives fully occupied with the other interests and diver-
sions of the machine age. What does it matter that earnest men have found a
way to combine older beliefs with the spirit of science, if those beliefs have ceased
to express anything vital in men's experience, if the older religious faith is
irrelevant to all they really care for? A truly intelligent Fundamentalist, indeed,
would leave biology alone as of little influence. He would instead try to abolish
the automobiles and movies and Sunday papers and golf links that are emptying
our churches. Even when the Church embraces the new interests, it seems to
be playing a losing game. There is little of specifically religious significance in
the manifold activities of the modern institutional church; a dance for the build-
ing fund is less of a religious experience than a festival in honor of the patron
saint. And any minister knows that his "social activities" spring less from real

Macmillan, 1929.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 709

need than from the fervent desire to attract and hold members. The church
itself has been secularized. Its very members continue a half-hearted support,
from motives of traditional attachment, of personal loyalty to the minister, of
social prestige, because they do not want to live in a churchless community.18

Unquestionably, another important cause of the lessening of the prestige
and influence of the church is to be discerned in the decline of the in-
tellectual caliber of the clergy. There was a time in America when the
clergy constituted the real intellectual aristocracy of the country. Today,
no such claim can be advanced for the contemporary American clergy,
as a group, though the church does continue to bring some powerful in-
tellects into her service.

The church must further face the rivalry of new techniques for the
dissemination of religious and ethical doctrines. The pulpit once pos-
sessed something like a monopoly of the discussion of religious and other
moral and public issues. Today, we have an extensive development of
the public lecture forum, university extension courses, and institutions
for adult education, to say nothing of the press, which, as a strong social
factor, is primarily a product of the last half century. Many believe that
if religion is to be secularized and devoted to the cause of social better-
ment, the lecture platform and the public forum are better suited than
the church as a medium for disseminating ethical doctrines. Then there
are not a few progressive experts in religious education who contend that,
if the public schools were properly conducted, they would perform the
function of character education, for the instruction in which we have
hitherto formally relied primarily upon the church.

The publicity given to religion and the churches by radio services is
partly offset by the fact that many people who feel the need of religious
guidance may stay in their homes and listen to the radio instead of attend-
ing, and contributing to, the local places of worship. Formerly, a man of
religious inclinations was dependent upon the local parson. However
intolerable the homiletic exercises of this local man of God, there was no
feasible escape. Today, the same person may turn on his radio and
listen to one of the ablest and most distinguished preachers in the country.
Further, the radio offers him greater economies of time and effort. He
may sit down comfortably in an easy chair, light his pipe, and turn on
the radio only at the moment when the preacher begins his discourse.
The appeal of the radio is, of course, rendered the more effective today
since, as we have seen above, there is no significant social incentive to
church attendance as there was in the days of the old rural neighborhood.

The radio services are likely to have the most serious effect upon the
attendance and financial support of the Protestant churches. The
Protestant cults have tended to concentrate worship primarily in the
preaching service, which is peculiarly well-adapted to broadcasting. On
the other hand, the elaborate ritual and liturgy of the Catholic church
can scarcely be reproduced with full effect over the radio. But television
may solve even this problem.

i*Loc, cit., June, 1929.

710 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

Even friendly observers are impressed with the degree to which the
church devotes itself primarily to the perpetuation of its organization
and the preservation of its status rather than to the improvement of
human well-being and the spiritual uplift of its communicants. A repre-
sentative exposition of this point of view was contained in an article by
Rollo Walter Brown on "An Observer Warns the Church" in Harper's.™

In the first place, Professor Brown contends that the church is closely
geared to the economic interests of its parishioners. He says that he has
found through long experience and careful checking that he can predict
the nature of the sermons which will be preached in any given church by
the length of the wheel-base of the automobiles parked in front of it:

A long-wheel-base church still means much preaching about "the manifold
blessings of life," the rewards of honest thrift, the beauty of Christian fellowship
— only nine people are there — the glory of giving something out of our abundance,
the sanctity of the faith of our saintly fathers and mothers, and much reading
of inspirational poetry.

A middle-wheel-base church means strong words for tolerance, plenty of ad-
monitions thai we must not be too hurtful with our Convictions, reminders that
compromise is the law of the practical world, and informing lecture-sermons on
non-controversial subjects.

And a short-wheel-base church means indignation, demands for a shifting of the
burden of life, many examples of the sins of the greedy, and the reading of for-
gotten radical quotations from Abraham Lincoln or some other known champion
of the people.

To believe that any one of these wheel-bases expresses the way of life of Jesus
would be difficult enough. But how could anybody, by any possible stretch
of the imagination, believe they all do? Somewhere along the way the church
has experienced a disintegration of all singleness of purpose.20

Attention is also called to the pomp and ceremony. "Just what would
Jesus think of the spectacle of a military memorial mass in the Harvard
football stadium, with photographs flashed over the country that look
like nothing so much as a Hitler review, and with reports dramatically
telling how the quiet of the Sunday morning air was rent by the roar of
cannon announcing consecration?"

While Jesus himself was a reformer, Professor Brown contends that
tjie church is not only opposed to reform but attempts to wipe out re-
formers, as the vested interests attempted to wipe out Jesus in his day:

If a newspaper editor who writes on Spain sees some good in the People's Front,
then the thing to do is to have representatives of the church see if he cannot
quietly be removed to a position where he cannot be heard. Or if a college presi-
dent in all honesty comes out for social changes that would possibly affect the
pocketbooks of men in the denomination that supports the college, then the
trustees hire somebody to pray over the matter for them, and for some reason —
any reason but the real one — decide that the president has special abilities better
suited to a less influential post. That saves all the trouble of having the facts
examined.

19 October, 1937.

20 Brown, loc. cit.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 71T

Professor Brown maintains that the church is even afraid of its own
liberal spokesmen, that it is afraid of the masses, the very type to which
Jesus ministered, and is afraid of youth, and the spirit of youth. He
warns it to wake up and preach a vital message before it is too late:

There may yet be time. But if the church uses up its energy in the business
of making itself solid, if it occupies itself with wars of one kind or another, if
nobody rises up to give the philosophy of Jesus a fair chance in the church and
through its representatives, the church may well face a more tragic eclipse than
any that it has imagined for itself at the hands of external enemies.

In spite of the serious and diversified effects of contemporary life upon
religion and the churches, the American churches were able to keep up
with the social procession, so far as formal membership and the value of
church property were concerned, down to 1926. Except for the Roman
Catholic Church, the figures for the 1936 religious census indicated a
decline in the fortunes of the church. Membership grew slightly, but
almost wholly among the Catholics and not anywhere near in proportion
to the increase of population. The value of church property declined
and there was an alarming falling off in church expenditures and in the
number of churches.

In 1936, there were 199,302 churches and synagogues in the country,
as against 232,154 in 1926. The total membership of all churches was
55,807,366, as compared with 54,807,366 in 1926. In 1926, the member-
ship listed as being of age 13 and over was approximately 37 millions or
about 55 per cent of the total population of that age. The proportion of
church membership in this age group was somewhat lower in 1936 than
in 1906, 1916, and 1926. Far and away the largest single group in the
church rnembership population were the Catholics, who numbered
19,914,937, as compared with 18,600,000 in 1926. The total value of
church property in 1936 was $3,411,875,000, as against $3,839,500,000 in
1926. Church expenditures in 1936 were $518,953,000, a marked drop
from the figure of $817,214,000 in 1926. That the hold of the church
upon youth may be slipping is suggested by the fact that Sunday School
membership has fallen off when compared with the growth of population.
The Protestants still far outnumber the Catholics, but the latter are hold-
ing their ground better. As Boyd Barrett has pointed out in his im-
portant book, Rome Stoops to Conquer,21 the Catholic church is today
concentrating upon the United States as its great hope for future expan-
sion.

Though the clergymen are losing their relative prestige in American
intellectual life, they are better trained than at any time in the past.
Yet, in 1926, only 5 out of 8 ministers in white denominations claimed to
be graduates of either a college or a seminary. Only one out of 4 Negro
ministers was thus educated.

Perhaps the most notable recent developments in the history of the
church are those associated with social activity and philanthropy. Socio-

; 1935,

712 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

religious organizations, such as the Y.M.C.A. (2,493,756 members), the
Y.M.H.A. (450,000 members), and the Knights of Columbus (409,393
members), have grown markedly in membership, in financial resources,
and in expenditures since 1900. The churches are spending more money
than ever before in maintaining schools, orphanages, hospitals, and other
forms of charitable enterprise.

The Protestants have recognized the weaknesses growing out of dis-
unity and a number of movements have been established to promote
mergers of various sects. The Interchurch World Movement sought to
unite Protestants in various forms of cooperative endeavor, but the con-
troversy over the steel strike of 1919 and other types of friction led to its
collapse in 1920. In rural communities, economic pressure has forced
the abandonment of many churches and the creation of federated and
community churches — a healthy development. We have already men-
tioned the rise of the radio and its relation to the local attendance and
support of churches.

The strongest organization of the Protestant groups in this country
today is the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America,
founded in 1908, with a formal membership of 24 million. It has not
eliminated sectarianism but it has been able to bring about some unified
activity in behalf of peace and social justice. While the Catholic church
can probably depend upon its organization and discipline to maintain its
prestige for some time to come, the power and influence of the Protestant
churches will probably depend upon the degree to which they take an
active and constructive part in public affairs.

Religion, Morals, and Crime

One of the most persistent arguments in behalf of religion, especially
orthodox religion, is that the latter acts as a collective policeman. With-
out the coercive influence of religion, it is said, society would soon dis-
integrate into anarchy, violence, and rapine. Cardinal O'Connell of
Boston has well expressed this position: "The only thing that keeps the
human race in some sort of plausible order is the overpowering content
qf God upon the minds of man. . . . When religion goes, only one thing
can follow logically — the bayonet." The moralizing influence of orthodox
religion, which we usually take for granted, is, however, by no means a
demonstrated fact. The unreliability and selfishness of most ostenta-
tiously pious persons is notorious and readily explained by the psycholo-
gist. However, only recently have thoroughgoing studies of the actual
effect of religion upon conduct been made. The information gathered
by scientists seems to discredit the conventional notion that orthodoxy
powerfully promotes such desirable moral traits as honesty, reliability,
and unselfishness. J. H. Leuba showed that the majority of prominent
American academicians and men of science had discarded orthodoxy but
it will be conceded, even by those most critical of the intelligentsia, that
the professorial class is distinguished for its docile and law-abiding be-
havior.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 713

It is obvious that the only way to arrive at any finality of judgment is
to carry on a prolonged series of psychological investigations into the
actual processes of character formation, in order thus to ascertain the
relative influence of religion therein. Such a project was carried out
under the auspices of the Institute of Social and Religious Research in
New York City. The investigation was directed by Hugh H^rtshorne
of Columbia University and Mark A. May of Yale. The first volume,
Studies in Deceit, indicated that orthodox religious training, either Chris-
tian or Jewish, did not promote honesty and reliability. To the contrary,
children who had been exposed to progressive educational methods, based
upon secular premises and the exploitation of modern psychology, ap-
peared to have a far better record as to honesty and dependability.

In reporting the results of an elaborate test of more than three thousand
children, at a meeting of the International Congress of Psychology, P. R.
Hightower showed definitely that the tendency of the children tested to
lie, cheat, and the like, was in direct proportion — not in inverse ratio — to
their knowledge of the Bible and scriptural precepts. He concluded that:
"mere knowledge of the Bible of itself is not sufficient to insure proper
character attitudes." At the same meeting, T. H. Howells reported that
religiously orthodox college students seemed less capable of dealing with
problems of conduct than the liberal and sophisticated students, and
were much more susceptible to irrational suggestion. It does not appear,
therefore, that religion and religious education exert any notable influ-
ence in promoting better moral conduct of even a conventional sort.

It is commonly believed that no man would be safe on the broad streets
at high noon, were it not for the shadow of the church spire and the in-
fluence of religion in keeping alive a fear of the hereafter and helping to
build character. However, a considerable amount of factual information
fails to substantiate this belief.22 In his Religion and Roguery, Frank
Steiner analyzed recent statistics of convicts in the penitentiaries of the
United States. He found that 84 per cent claimed Christian affiliation.
Out of 85,000 convicts, 5,389 were of the Jewish faith. There were only
8,000 "unchurched," and 150 avowed infidels.

The distinguished Dutch sociologist and criminologist, W. A. Bonger,
made a careful statistical study of the relation between religious affiliation
and criminality in the Netherlands. He found that the Roman Catholics
came first in the ratio of criminality, the Protestants second, the Jews
third, and the free-thinkers lowest of all. Carl Murchison examined the
religious state of the inmates of the Maryland penitentiary. He found
that there was a far larger proportion of church members in the prison
than in the general population of the state. In his work on 'The Church
and Crime in the United States," Dr. C. V. Dunn investigated the religious
connections of inmates of 27 penitentiaries and 19 reform schools. He

22 John R. Miner, "Do Churches Prevent Crime," The American Mercury, Janu-
ary, 1932. See also Swancara, The Obstruction of Justice by Religion, Chaps. VII-

vin. •

714 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

found that 71.8 per cent of the prisoners were members of Catholic or
Protestant churches. Yet only 46.6 per cent of the total population of
the United States are members of any religious body.2-a

This great apparent preponderance of the allegedly religious persons in
penitentiary populations may be due in some degree to false statements
on the purt of inmates. Convicts may, in some cases, fake religious
connections in the hope of making a more favorable impression on the
authorities. But this consideration is not adequate to upset the obvious
fact that a decisive majority of our criminals are persons who have been
brought up in orthodox religious surroundings.

Another way of approaching the problem is to try to find the correla-
tion, if any, between the amount of criminality in any region and the
proportion of church membership therein. This is possible to compute
on the basis of the information published by the Bureau of the Census.
Such an investigation was made and published in Human Biology.23 On
the whole, it was found that there was little relationship between the
proportion of church members in any given state and the volume of crime.
Likewise, a high percentage of membership in any particular religious
denomination seemed to have little bearing on the amount of existing
crime. However, there was an apparent correlation between certain
types of religion and homicide. In states with a high percentage of
Roman Catholics there are few homicides. In those where Methodists
and Baptists predominate we find a high proportion of homicides. How-
ever, general social conditions may have as much to do with the homicide
situation as the religious set-up. If so, this would in itself prove that
religion has little unique power to enforce the "thou shalt not kill" clause
of the Scriptures.

Summing up, then, prison populations show an overwhelming majority
of those who claim religious affiliations. In the population at large, a
high percentage of church membership has no apparent influence in sup-
pressing criminality in the community. Therefore, pending further
study, we may accept Dr. Miner's conclusion that "there is little evidence
that the churches play any major part in the prevention of crime."

Historical Attitudes Toward Ethics and Conduct

As we have suggested earlier in the chapter, religion has been closely
associated in the past with the problems and practices of morality. We
may appropriately conclude this chapter by a discussion of the develop-
ment of ethical theory and its impending reconstruction in the light of
science and critical philosophy.

In primitive society there was no true ethical theory beyond the uni-
versal assumption of the divine origin of all folkways and customs. The

22a Annals of the American Academy, 1926, pp. 200-228.
28 September, 1931.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 715

prevailing doctrine was that custom is sacred and must be blindly and
unthinkingly obeyed. The very idea of a critical theory of ethics would
be repugnant to primitive people.24

Nor did sceptical theorizing about conduct in the ancient Near East
become a matter of practical import, even though an occasional sage or
prophet produced, from time to time, incisive observations on the subject.
Such were the Egyptian social critics about 2000 B.C., and the Hebrew
prophets. The accepted view was that "what is, is right." Right was
embodied in customs handed down from an earlier day by sumptuary
legislation and royal proclamations. The "why" or the justice of a
precept was a subject which the discreet person never investigated too
closely. Indeed, it was assumed, as in primitive society, that the existing
codes constituted the will of the gods, and violation invited national as
well as personal disaster.

With the Attic Greeks the animistic and theological explanations of
conduct were in part abandoned by intellectuals in favor of a metaphysi-
cal approach to the problem. Socrates and Plato contended that there
were certain transcendental, permanent, and immutable norms of right
and justice — metaphysical realities which existed anterior to man and
independent of any particular time or place. These eternal verities
might be discovered and defined by careful philosophical study. Aristotle
introduced a much more rational and secular theory of ethics. He main-
tained that the chief human good and the true end of life is happiness.
The best life is a well-rounded existence, guided by reason and virtue.
He advocated intellectual restraint which would guide the individual into
a happy mean between irrational indulgence and ascetic self-denial. The
speculative life of wisdom was regarded by Aristotle as the most perfect
and divine, but he thought that it should be tempered by a discreet culti-
vation of the social graces and the satisfaction of normal human desires.
The Stoics combined metaphysics and revelation. The wisdom of God,
in the form of the logos, was believed to permeate the cosmos. Man
might appropriate some small portion of this divine wisdom through his
rational powers, thus learning the divine wishes as to the intricacies of
personal conduct. This metaphysical mode of approach to the problems
of conduct has persisted to our own day, though the progressive philoso-
phers like James, Dewey, James H. Tufts, Durant Drake, and Bertrand
Russell have severely challenged it. The most striking and original step
in ethical theory taken by the Greek thinkers appeared in the wrritings of
the Sophists and Epicureans, who recognized the relativity of our ideas
of what is right and wrong, how they are derived from custom, and their
service in promoting social discipline.

While the Christians retained much of the Hellenic metaphysics in
their ultimate theology, their ethical doctrines resembled the primitive
and oriental attitude, namely, the belief in the specific revelation of codes

24 See above, pp. 17 ff., 29 ff.

716 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

of conduct, based upon infallible religious texts. The orthodox early
Christian did not arrive at his conclusions in regard to ethical theory
through careful, analytical reasoning. He felt it necessary only to read
the Mosaic Code and certain New Testament writings, especially the
ethical precepts of the Pauline Epistles. To these were later added the
commentaries of the Church Fathers. But, in any case, the source of
guidance was explicit revelation and authoritative command. The meta-
physical and logical approach to religion, which became rather more im-
portant in the medieval Scholastic period, influenced theology far more
than it did the theories and practices in regard to conduct. What were
believed to be the commands or wishes of God in any matter of behavior
have remained to this day the universal source of formal guidance to
orthodox Christians in the field of conduct. The Protestants, however,
laid more stress upon the severe and austere teachings of the Old Testa-
ment as the source of moral guidance. The Puritans put special em-
phasis upon rigorous personal morality, as an overcompensation for their
somewhat dubious economic and commercial ventures in piracy, the slave
trade, the rum trade, kidnapping and the like.

The period of Rationalism, in early modern times, was characterized
by the growth of an empirical and pragmatic attitude towards the sources
of ethical guidance and the validity of codes of conduct — a position re-
sembling the Sophistic and Epicurean approach. There also developed
among the Deists a new type of metaphysic, drawn from the Newtonian
natural science and celestial mechanics. This view contended that proper
human conduct, like the motion and paths of the planets and all other
processes and manifestations of nature, was based upon a universal
natural norm, order, or law, which was of divine origin.

While the Deists believed that conduct should be based upon the laws
of nature, they identified God with nature, thus retaining an essentially
theistic view of morality. David Hume, who founded what is known as
Hedonism in ethics, and laid the basis for utilitarianism, more than any
other writer between the Greek period and his own age, was responsible
for the divorce of ethics from theology. He held that the only test of
true morality is its contribution to the increase of human happiness
here and now. He suggested an empirical and experimental attitude
towards morality by holding that we must study the effects of different
forms of conduct upon human happiness.

There were also certain important anticipations of the purely esthetic
approach to moral problems in the writings of Montaigne, the third
Earl of Shaftesbury, and others. They regarded moral conduct as an
expression of good taste and an appreciation of the true and the beautiful.
In the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson, we find a
foreshadowing of the ethnographic approach to problems of conduct and
ethical codes, exemplified in our own era by Spencer, Ratzel, Sumner,
Frazer, Westermarck, Briffault, and others. According to this view of
ethics, whatever is done in any area is believed to be right by the in-
habitants. Right is relative to time and place, rather than anything

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 717

absolute.25 In Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments there appeared
the first systematic effort to construct an ethical theory upon psycho-
logical premises. Smith explained morality on the basis of reflective
sympathy. An observer tends to project himself into the situation of
another and to imagine how he would feel under the same circumstances.
Hence we are naturally impelled to do those things which will promote
happiness and avert sorrow. His ideas can be described as an extension
of the Golden Rule.

The Romanticist and Idealist philosophers, who flourished in the cen-
tury following 1750, revived the religious sanctions of morality. The
most famous of these ethical doctrines was expressed by Immanuel Kant.
He denied that morality should be judged by its social effects or social
utility. Instead, he promulgated the concept of the "categorical im-
perative," or the theory of unconditioned and obligatory morality. We
should not be guided in our behavior by the expectation of immediate
benefits or penalties. Rather, we must live in such a manner that our
lives may seem, in our small way, an imitation of the moral law of the
universe. This was a veritable deification of the abstract sense of duty.
Others, like Schleiermacher, went even further, and contended that the
only true guide to moral life was to be found in the study and imitation
of the life of Jesus.

The most important advance in ethical theory in the half century
following Kant was the development of Utilitarianism by Jeremy
Bentham and his disciples. This notion was founded upon a definite
psychological basis — the famous felicific calculus. Man was represented
as a consciously calculating animal, carefully and discriminatingly hesi-
tating before every choice. He was believed to weigh the relative possi-
bilities of pleasurable satisfaction or pain, likely to result from each and
every act. Socially considered, this form of ethics tested the ethical
justification of any act by its prospect of contributing to the "greatest
happiness for the greatest number." When interpreted in harmony with
the discoveries of differential biology and psychology, such an ethical
standard may be regarded as perhaps the best genelfcl statement yet
made for sound moral behavior. But its specific psychological founda-
tion— the felicific calculus — has been proved by Graham Wallas and
others to be quite obviously fallacious.26 Further, it provided no ade-
quate technique for actually discovering the precise nature of the
"greatest happiness."

Closely related to the ethics of the utilitarian school was the sociological
theory of conduct, which took form in the writings of Comte, Post, Spen-
cer, Bagehot, and Ward around the middle third of the nineteenth century.
They accepted, either tacitly or explicitly, the utilitarian "greatest happi-
ness" criterion as to the validity of forms of conduct. But they sought

25 See above, pp. 29 ff.

26 Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, Knopf, 1921. See also, W. C. Mitchell,
"Bentham's Felicific Calculus/' in Political Science Quarterly, June, 1918.

718 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

the origins of such conduct in social evolution, natural selection, and the
survival value of institutions. The evolutionary process, they held, tends
to favor socially desirable forms of conduct, and to eliminate the un-
desirable and detrimental. This evolutionary trend in sociological ethics,
together with Darwinian evolutionary biology, gave rise to a naturalistic
school of evolutionary ethical theory, represented by such men as Lecky,
Stephen, Fiske, Hobhouse, Westermarck, Sumner, and others. Biology
replaced theology as the guide to, and appraiser of, human conduct.

Many of these later trends in the study of codes of conduct laid the
foundations for a real science of conduct. But no one of these approaches
provided any real mode of finding out just what forms of conduct produce
the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The means for such a
discovery were laid by sciences such as biology, chemistry, psychology,
medicine, and psychiatry, and by esthetics.

Sociologists should quickly have exploited this opportunity, but most of
them were extremely tardy in so doing, preferring to build up semimeta-
physical systems of sociology or to construct elaborate rationalized de-
fenses of their own orthodox ethical beliefs. Socially-minded psychia-
trists and educators were the first to provide, through mental hygiene,,
a concerted and well-organized effort to get at the facts essential to the
formulation of any valid code for individual and social conduct. Slowly
and very recently, some of the more progressive sociologists have taken
cognizance of these developments, as has been demonstrated by the works
of Thomas, Ogburn, Groves, Bernard, and Young. When, and only when,
the proper liaison has been established between esthetics, mental hygiene,
and sociology, will there at last be provided, after several generations of
cooperative study, a real science of conduct.

The Genesis of Moral Codes

One of the best modern statements of the conventional supernatural
and metaphysical theory of ethics and the nature of moral codes is con-
tained in Louis T. Morc's The Dogma of Evolution: 27

As for the facts and laws of morality, it is conceded that they have been
known for thousands of years. . . . Thus moral progress is not coincident with
scientific achievement or even causally related to it. If morals were merely an
adaptation to our environment, or if they were conventions of society, then they
should rise and fall with the rhythm of rational and scientific progress. Instead
of such variation, the standards of morality remain fixed and eternal truths.

The manner in which moral codes actually develop has been admirably
described, among others, by Wilfred Trotter and William Graham Sum-
ner.28 In the process of social evolution, one of the chief requirements of
survival has been group cohesion and discipline. It has been secured at,
the price of individual conformity to the commands of the group. The
group, or herd, has always been swift and severe in its punishment of the

27 Princeton University Press, 1925.

28 See above, Chaps. I-IL

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 719

nonconformist. Primitive man regards his institutions and their support-
ing superstitions as the product of a special divine revelation. As Simmer
puts it: "The folkways are habits of the individual and customs of the
society which arise from efforts to satisfy needs; they are intertwined
with goblinism and demonism and primitive notions of luck, and so they
win traditional authority. They become regulative for succeeding
generations and take on the character of a social force. ... At every
turn we find evidence that the mores can make anything right and pre-
vent the condemnation of anything." 29

We may be sure that much of the potential originality and inventive-
ness of the human race has been eliminated through the extinction of the
more daring and independent members of the group. The codes of con-
duct which the herd has enforced with rigor and savagery have never
been carefully thought out or experimentally tested modes of behavior.
They were, rather, the crude products of superstition and the trial-and-
error methods, whereby man has been able to effect some kind of working
adjustment to his environment and to the perpetuation of his kind.
This origin of the manners and customs of humanity is amply demon-
strated by innumerable ethnographic studies which reveal the great
diversity of human practices in every range of conduct and type of
behavior.

In this manner arose those standards of conduct which the average
person designates as "the old, sturdy virtues of manhood and woman-
hood," "the tried wisdom of the ages," "the sanctity of the fathers," "the
enduring and permanent foundations of our institutions," and other
rhetorical elaborations. Only the historical and sociological approach
to the study of ethical codes can make completely clear the misleading
character of such convictions.

At the same time, it docs not follow, as some would seem to believe,
that all customs thus acquired are necessarily wholly unscientific or
harmful. The evolutionary and selective processes have tended, in a
rough general manner, to eliminate those groups which have the least
efficient codes and institutions. The fact that most earlier civilizations
have disintegrated may legitimately lead to the suspicion that the evolu-
tionary process has proved that earlier mores, considered collectively,
were inadequate and led ultimately to the downfall of the cultures with
which they were associated. However, certain specific customs within
the general cultural complex may accidentally have been sound and
conducive to social strength and cohesion.

Directly connected with the metaphysical and supernatural conception
in regard to the derivation and nature of moral codes is the prevailing
notion as to how man becomes conscious of right and wrong, and is able to
seek the former and avoid the latter. The orthodox and popular view is
that there is some metaphysical entity, called the "conscience," implanted
in every human breast. Its. "still, small voice" reveals to man, God's.

20 Sec above, pp. 29 ff.

720 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

uniform, invariable, and immutable will on all questions, from throwing
dice to casting a vote for president of the United States. It was always
difficult to harmonize this conception with the observed fact that, in
certain areas, this inner conviction led some to prepare for a respectable
career by head-hunting and others, in a different part of the globe, by
committing to memory the catechism of the Roman Catholic church.
Nor was it easily possible to explain why God allowed the "still, small
voice" to speak in many and diverse ways to individuals in the same
cultural group. Any divergence of conduct from that approved by the
majority of the herd was explained by the hypothesis of the devil and his
influence.

This older view of a mysterious conscience has been replaced in modern
dynamic psychology by the concept of the censor and the conditioned-
reflex. From earliest infancy, the contact of the child with parents, rela-
tives, friends, and associates brings a varied but potent body of informa-
tion. These experiences inculcate ideas, concepts, and attitudes which
determine his notions of what is right and wrong. In this way, the ideas
and practices of the great and little herds, with which the individual
comes into contact, are translated into individual belief and action.
There is little probability that our convictions as to right and wrong, thus
derived, bear any close relation to the scientific facts in the circumstances.
Herd opinion and activities have never yet been founded upon scientific
investigation or statistical verification. But they do represent what our
herds believe to be right, and, hence, they constitute a practical guide to
life in a given community. The "still, small voice," then, appears, upon
adequate investigation, not to be the voice of God, but, as Professor James
Harvey Robinson once facetiously expressed it, "the still, small voice of
the herd."

The Essentials of a Rational Moral Code

The supernatural and irrational nature of our conventional ethical
codes and their rationalized defense can probably best be made clear by
contrasting with them our attitudes towards matters which have already
been brought within the range of scientific analysis and control. If we
are ill in any manner or degree, suffer from toothache, have a leak in the
plumbing, need a garage erected, require some overhauling of the motor
in our car, or desire a radio set installed, we are at once impressed with
the reasonableness and necessity of conferring with a trained specialist in
the field — a physician, dentist, plumber, mechanic, or electrician. Yet,
we are willing to accept as valid judgments upon the extremely complex
problems of conduct the standards enunciated, approved, and enforced by
persons utterly lacking in scientific training.

This inconsistency is even worse than it might seem at first sight, since
the foregoing problems for the solution of which we would normally have
recourse to a scientist or technician, are extremely simple, when compared
with the matter of solving scientifically the problems of conduct. The
wholehearted cooperation of a large number of scientific experts would

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 721

be essential to arrive at any reliable verdict on any ethical problem. To
formulate even the most tentative body of ethical doctrine, which could
be expected to possess any scientific validity and command the respect
of a critical and sceptical intellect, we would require the collaboration of
highly intelligent and thoroughly trained respresentatives of chemistry,
biology, physiology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, eco-
nomics, esthetics, and history. To deal with the further problem of the
application and enforcement of a code of conduct we would need the aid
of the political scientists and the students of jurisprudence, education,
and journalism.

Two things, then, are perhaps the most conspicuous about the sources
of guidance for the "good life" in terms of a contemporaneous view of
things: (1) the multiplicity of those secular sciences and fields of endeavor
which must be drawn upon, and (2) the essential exclusion of the theolo-
gian in this process. The theologian, in the modern scheme of things, has
no more propriety in morals and esthetics than in engineering or physical
chemistry. The Bible, as such, need not be approached with any more
reverential awe respecting its injunctions with regard to human conduct
than we might bring to it when studying the history of medicine or cos-
mology. If the Ten Commandments are to be obeyed today, it is only
because their precepts and advice may be proved to square with the best
natural and social science of the present time. They must be subjected
to the same objective scientific scrutiny as that which we would apply to
the cosmology of Genesis or the medical views in Leviticus.

The new cosmic perspective and biblical criticism, indeed, rule out of
civilized nomenclature one of the basic categories of all religious and
metaphysical morality, namely, sin. One may admit the existence of
immorality and crime, but scarcely sin, which is, by technical definition,
a willful and direct affront to God — a violation of the explicitly revealed
will of God. Modern science has shown it to be difficult to prove the very
existence of God, and even more of a problem to show any direct solicitude
of God for our petty and ephemeral planet. Biblical criticism, the
history of religion, and cultural history have revealed the fact that we
can, in no direct and literal sense, look upon the Bible or any other exist-
ing holy book as curely embodying the revealed will of God. Conse-
quently, if we do not and cannot know the nature of the will of God in
regard to human behavior, we cannot very well know when we are
violating it. In other words, sin is scientifically indefinable and un-
knowable. Hence, sin goes into the limbo along with such ancient
superstitions as witchcraft and sacrifice.

It is, of course, true that many acts hitherto branded as sinful may be
socially harmful, but such action should be scientifically rechristened as
immoral or criminal, and we should, as rapidly as possible, dispense with
such an anachronistic term as "sin," even in popular phraseology. In
this way only will sin "vanish from the world!"

It can be conceded that the sense of sin is a genuine human experience
with many persons, and, hence, it exists as a psychological reality. The

722 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

psychoanalysts have, however, shown that the "sense of sin" is a psycho-
physical attribute of adolescent mental development.

In attempting to formulate tentatively the essentials of an efficient and
sound ethical system it would be necessary first to consider man as an
animal, and to catalogue the various drives, instincts, impulses, and
motives which dominate him as a member of the biological world. It
would then be essential to investigate how far, with regard to man purely
as an individual, the direct and immediate expression of these drives and
impulses, with the satisfactions thus produced, is desirable and beneficial,
and to what degree it is detrimental and should be repressed, diverted, or
sublimated. But man cannot be considered solely as an isolated animal,
existing in a primitive or pre-cultural age. He must be viewed as a
member of an advanced and cultivated society, with intimate and com-
plicated social relationships, obligations, and responsibilities.

The decision as to what is best for him, as an isolated animal, must,
then, be modified in the light of his social environment. However, any
lessening of man's organic efficiency and quality must necessarily ulti-
mately weaken and undermine his social institutions. A proper balance
must be struck between those forms of conduct which secure the greatest
amount of physical vigor and psychic efficiency and those which will
produce the most notable cultural achievements. That there may be
some clash and necessity for compromise here need not be doubted, but
it is highly probable that there is actually far less divergence than is
usually assumed between those forms of conduct which advance the
physical well-being of a nation and those which impel it to higher ranges
of cultural progress.

Our notions of efficiency in the determination of ethical conduct must
be broad enough to include a consideration of esthetics and the dictates
of "the true and beautiful." Indeed, there is much ground upon which to
support the contention of the Earl of Shaftesbury in the early eighteenth
century that virtue and morals are a fine art, and that the esthetic criteria
of conduct are perhaps the most valid of all.30 In fact, it might be de-
sirable to give up entirely the old category of morals or morality, and
substitute a term more accurately descriptive of the new objective,
namely, morale. As the late G. Stanley Hall has put it:

If there is any chief end of man, any goal or destiny supreme over all others
... it is simply this — to keep ourselves, body and soul, and pur environment,
physical, social, industrial, etc., always at the tip-top of condition. This super-
hygiene is best designated as morale. ... It is the only truly divine power that
ever was or will be. Hence it follows that morale thus conceived is the one and
only true religion of the present and the future, and its doctrines are the only
true theology. Every individual situation and institution, every race, nation,
class, or group is best graded as ascendent or decadent by its morale.31

80 See below, pp. 838 ff.

81 Morale, the Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct, Appleton-Century, 1919,
pp. 1-2.

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 723

The body of such moral practice, or the foundations of morale, would
be far more comprehensive than anything now prevailing. It would not
be limited to formal correctness with respect to an archaic attitude to-
wards sex, but would promote the principles of honesty, justice, sym-
pathy, and kindliness in all aspects of life. Probably more would also
be made of the distinction between the conventionally "moral" man and
"the man of honor," with the latter as the preferable ideal. H. L.
Mencken has well distinguished between these two types by his definition
of the man of honor as a person who sincerely regrets having committed a
disreputable act, even if he has not been detected in it.

The difficultly of working out such an approximately perfect system of
conduct, particularly in its applicability to individual guidance, is indi-
cated by the great differences in ability, taste, and pliability of man.
We have, more or less, assumed in the above discussion the uniformity of
the population in ability and native endowment, and have implied that
some valid code of conduct can be worked out which will be equally
applicable to all persons. All men have been represented in pietistic
tradition as equal before God. But, as Aristotle intuitively perceived,
and Galton, Pearson, Terman, and their associates and disciples have
proved, this is one of the most obvious fallacies of popular social, politi-
cal, and ethical thought. Wide variations in capacity and personal
control appear to be the most important single fact about the human
race, thus showing that mankind conforms to the general implications of
the normal frequency curve, descriptive of the variations generally ob-
servable throughout the whole realm of nature. Therefore, certain kinds
of conduct which will not be harmful for the abler members of society;
which, indeed, may be positively desirable and beneficial for them, may
be dangerous for their less capable fellow-citizens, relatively lacking in
poise, self-control, and intellectual discrimination. There are vast differ-
ences among men and women in physical size, strength, endurance, tastes,
and needs. It is obviously as silly to prescribe for universal observance
a meticulously precise and uniform code of conduct as it would be to
decree that every man must wear the same size of hat and every woman
the same size of shoe. Some general uniformities may wisely be laid
down, provided they square with sound science and esthetics, but mod-
ern science emphasizes the folly of demanding identical conduct on the
part of all mankind.

Pluralism, as Montaigne suggested centuries ago, thus becomes a prob-
lem for advanced ethical theory quite as much as for political theory. It
raises the problem of man's being his "brother's keeper" with different
implications. Hitherto, it has been assumed that a genius should repress
his desires, cramp and paralyze his personality, and destroy much of his
power for creative work, so that a dozen morons may possibly obtain a
hypothetical harp in a suppositions New Jerusalem. In the light of the
fact that all human progress has been due primarily to the work of the
able few, the modern student of ethical theory will probably assert that
it is better to sacrifice a thousand morons rather than seriously to handi-

724 THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS

cap a single genius. But whether or not one accepts this generalization,
the problem remains one of adjusting any scientific moral code to the
extensive variations in human capacity.

And again, no scientifically-oriented person would expect that anything
more than an approximation to an intelligent system of ethics could be
worked out by pure analysis, even by the most competent group of
cooperating scientists in all the relevant fields. We would need to survey
history, to discover, so far as possible, the effect of various forms of con-
duct in the past. Above all, we would require an experimental study of
the effects of our new code when applied, with the end in view of constant
revision as experience dictates the necessity for alterations.

The tenets of such a program could not be more revolutionary than
the very assumptions of the program — the notion of a tentative and exper-
imental attitude in regard to conduct. The view that conduct is not
divinely inspired, but socially determined, and should be frequently re-
vised and adapted to changing social and cultural conditions is diametri-
cally opposed to all orthodox views of ethical theory and practice. And
the proposal embraced in the above discussion regarding the possibility
of actually bringing together an adequate group of scientists to construct
a scientific body of ethical doctrine, and then getting it accepted by the
mass of mankind, may be fanciful and Utopian. Progress in the direction
of a scientific, esthetic and experimental attitude toward conduct will,
in all probability, be achieved only very slowly, unconsciously, and in a
highly piecemeal fashion.

The aim of the writer will have been executed if he has: (1) made clear
the extremely complicated and technical nature of the quest for a sound
ethical code; and (2) shown how grotesque it is for us to approve the
views on ethics held by the average metaphysician, clergyman, vice-
crusader, housewife, or Main Street gossip. Yet such notions are today
the sovereign guides of conduct for the majority of mankind, and it is
difficult for even the ablest of the race to disregard them with impunity
Even otherwise highly emancipated and cultivated persons like James
Truslow Adams urge their continued dominion over man.32
i The whole problem of ethical reconstruction is, however, something of
more than academic or curious import. Nothing could be more erroneous
than the assumption that, with the growing complexity of human society
and the decline of supernaturalism, we can dispense with a serious con-
sideration of the problems of conduct. There can be no question that
we are today in far greater need of a sound body of morality and an
ample morale than at any earlier time in history. An unscientific and
inefficient standard of conduct was far less dangerous in a static, simple,
agrarian society than it is in the complex, dynamic urban age of today.
And it will probably be necessary to enforce the desirable new standards
rather more rigidly than previously.

32 See his chapter in Living Philosophies, Simon and Schuster, 1932, pp. 153 ff., on
"Why Be Good?"

THE CRISIS IN RELIGION AND MORALS 725

Before we go far in this direction, however, we shall need to discover
by scientific means the nature of a valid code of conduct and make sure
that we are not trying to enforce a system which would be socially dis-
astrous. It will further be necessary to understand that to enforce
standards of conduct may be futile unless preceded by an adequate cam-
paign of public education. If man fails to meet the responsibility, the
wreck of our civilization will doubtless be the penalty which we shall pay
for the lack of a sound moral code, as our predecessors have invariably
paid it in previous ages.

The foregoing discussion should certainly make apparent how danger-
ous and inaccurate it is to maintain a distinction between "character" and
intelligence. There are, to be sure, many examples of men of high intelli-
gence who are utterly lacking in a sense of honor or decency, or in funda-
mental honesty and fairness, in exactly the same way that there are many
arrogant scoundrels among the clergy of the United States and among
foreign missionaries. But to assume that this constitutes any basis for
divorcing intelligence from morality is as absurd as it would be to con-
clude that no clergyman or missionary could be moral.

While there may be intelligent men who are not moral, there can cer-
tainly be no truly moral men who are not intelligent, unless one means
by morality unreasoning obedience to the dictates of the herd. If one
accepts this latter as the criterion of moral conduct, then many animals
and most insects are far more highly moral than any man. Indeed, one
can probably say that there is no completely intelligent person who is not,
at the same time, moral in the scientific sense of that term. Any devia-
tion from sound morality would constitute, to that degree, evidence of
shortqornings in his intelligence.

CHAPTER XVIII
Education in the Social Crisis

The Vital Importance of Education Today

WE HAVE already suggested that mankind is now in one of the great
transitional periods of human history, comparable to the dawn of history,
to the breakup of classical civilization with the decline of the Roman
Empire, or to the disintegration of medieval society with the rise of mod-
ern times between 1500 and 1800. In this transitional age the most
striking thing about our culture is the vast gulf which exists between the
mechanical era in which we live and the outworn institutions by which
we attempt to control our new empire of machines.1 We are proud of
our material equipment in proportion to its being thoroughly up to the
minute in model and performance; but we almost seem to take pride in
our thinking and institutions in the degree to which they are out of date
and inadequate to meet the emergencies of the present. Only when we
have become as ashamed of an out-of-date idea or institution as we are
of an out-moded bathtub or radio will there be much prospect of our
taking steps to build a civilized social order.

We even encourage this already serious discrepancy between our ma-
terial life and our social thinking. We give every conceivable reward
and encouragement to those who seek to invent new machines. On the
other hand we persecute, threaten, or even cast into jail those who would
invent the new social machinery that we must have if civilization is to
be maintained. We honor our Edisons but laugh to scorn our "brain
trusts" in government and economics.

All our contemporary problems are secondary manifestations of this
gulf between the two aspects of our civilization. Because we have failed
to improve our political institutions, in keeping with the changes in the
last century, we now find ourselves faced by the desperate situation aris-
ing out of the bellicosity of great national states and the inadequacies of
democracy and capitalism in meeting the complicated problems of our
industrial age. The answer to this is "crisis government," which means
some form of dictatorship. In the economic field, the failure of capital-
ism to insure productive efficiency, to,,provide for a fair distribution of
the social income, and to check the speculative manipulations of finance,
has already so undermined the capitalistic system as to call for the
intervention of force and Fascism in most of the important states of the

1 See above, Chap. III.

726

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 727

world. In the economic realm, Fascism is the answer to the crisis in
capitalism, as, in its political expression, it is the answer to the crisis in
democracy. It is often asserted that the only sound solution of our social
problems is to be found in education. This is probably true, but it will
require a different system of education from that which is now in opera-
tion.

The men who made the first World War, those who threw us into it,
those responsible for the great depression of 1929, and those who brought
on and extended the second World War were literally the best that our
educational system could produce; and their works are as much as we
can reasonably expect from this type of education.

The world finds itself today in a serious social, economic, and political
crisis. We must go ahead or backward. All sane persons want civiliza-
tion to move ahead rather than collapse. Education can provide the
only safe and assured leadership toward progress and prosperity.

If we are going to move ahead we have a clear choice — and only this
choice — between orderly progress, under intelligent guidance, or revolu-
tion, violence, and a gambling chance with the future. If we choose
orderly social advance, we must rely more and more upon the educational
direction of the social process. The problems of today have become so
complicated and technical that only well-educated public servants can
hope to deal with them effectively.

If education is going to assume a more important role in public affairs,
it must setjis own house in order and prepare itself for realistic instruc-
tion in terms of contemporary facts. The present system of education is
inadequate to supply the type of leadership which is necessary in the
current world crisis. It failed to live up to the responsibilities of the last
generation. It did not save the world from war or depression.

We must eliminate useless antiquities from the curriculum, stress the
realities of the twentieth century, and offer protection to members of the
teaching profession who expound courageously and honestly the facts as
they see them.

The social studies present the only cogent information that can enable
us to bridge the gulf between machines and institutions. More time
should be given to the social studies; also, their content must be made
more vital and be linked up with the immediate problems of our day.
We must provide security for the teachers of the social studies, for it is
here that most of the heresy-hunts are waged. No teacher is in much
danger analyzing the binomial theorem, but the teacher who resolutely
describes our economic and political system is constantly flirting with
dismissal.

Education is our best safeguard — almost our only safeguard — against
Fascism and Communism, and the foremost bulwark of democracy.
The more courageous and realistic it is, the better will it serve such pur-
poses. If it is cowardly, evasive, and time-serving, it cannot aspire to
vigorous leadership. Indeed, it will only contribute to the inevitability
of general misery and chaos. If the latter comes, education will share
in it to a particularly disastrous degree. In an era of social decline and

728 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

barbarism, there is little place for education. Let those who are scepti-
cal about this statement study the history of the Dark Ages. And let
those who are sceptical about the return of another Dark Age study world
events of the last fifteen years.

Some Landmarks in the History of Education

With our present great educational plant and our compulsory education
for all children, it is difficult for us to realize that it has been only about
100 years since we began to provide schools for all children, even in the
most highly civilized countries. Free public education for youth has been
a product of contemporary civilization.

Yet education, even though it was not provided in schools, has existed
since prehistoric times and cave-man culture. The social customs, be-
liefs, and manual arts which prevailed in any primitive group were taught
to the children from an early age. At certain special times there were
also formal ceremonies devoted to giving information about religious
and moral folkways. These were the famous initiation rites of primitive
society. The general purpose of primitive education was to inculcate the
wisdom of the elders, and great respect was developed therefor. It was
from primitive society that we derived our paralyzing respect for the
knowledge of the past, or, what has been called by Herbert Spencer, "the
dead hand."

In afccient oriental times the "wisdom" of the past was handed down
by the ^priesthood, in conjunction with the family education. Instruction
in the mechanical arts came chiefly from skilled workmen in homes and
shops. It is in this age that we discover the origins of natural and ap-
plied science. This arose chiefly in association with practical activities,
such as surveying and the study of the rise and fall of water levels. Even
medicine and surgery were regarded chiefly as skilled crafts. Since the
great mass of the people could neither read nor write, such education as
they received in matters of folkways, religion, and morals was imparted
by word of mouth. However, some great libraries were collected, and
educational centers were established where scholars could gather and dis-
pense the information they possessed.

Among the ancient Greeks we find the origins of formal education,
though this was limited to the children of citizens. The youth among
the slaves and foreigners picked up such education as was given them in
a purely informal manner. In Sparta, we find the origins of rigorous
discipline in education and the stressing of military training and loyalty
to the state. The boys were thrown into barracks at an early age, given
severe physical training, and taught the arts of war. There was little
literary education beyond chanting ancient laws and passages from
Homer. Bravery, brutality, and loyalty to the state were the essentials
of Spartan education.

In ancient Athens, a broader conception prevailed. Physical educa-
tion, music, reading, and writing were the main subjects prescribed for

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 729

the Athenian boys. The copying and memorizing of passages from the
Greek classics constituted the chief literary education. At the age of 18,
the boys were placed in the army and given two years of military train-
ing. Those who were trained for public life were given more extended
instruction in rhetoric, literature, and logic. The ability to make a florid
speech and to carry on oral argument was regarded as indispensable to a
successful life in politics. It was from the Greeks that we derived the
educational dogma that rhetorical talent and literary flourishes are the
chief marks of an educated man. Universities first appeared among the
Greeks at Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes. Here scholars gathered and
produced those contributions to philosophy and natural science for which
the Greeks were justly famous. The Sophists earnestly tried to bring
Greek education down to earth and to give it a practical cast. But they
met the same opposition from conservative pedants that comparable edu-
cational reformers have encountered in our day.

The Romans were influenced in their educational ideals by the Greeks,
as they were in all other phases of their intellectual life. Elementary and
secondary education were mainly designed to prepare one for a study of
rhetoric, and instruction in the latter remained the basic preparation for
successful public life. Toward the end of the Roman Empire, a precise
and stereotyped curriculum was provided for general literary education,
the so-called seven liberal arts: namely grammar, rhetoric, and logic
(the trivium), and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the
quadrivium). While it had been in practical use for a long time, this
curriculum was first formally outlined by Martinus Capella, a pedantic
scholar who is thought to have lived in the fourth century A.D. With
certain modifications and elaborations, this curriculum has remained the
basis of formal education from Roman times to our own day. Our
Bachelor of Arts degree in the colleges is derived from it directly.

In the Middle Ages there were remarkable changes in education, as
compared with the situation in Greece and Rome. A great part of the
learning of classical antiquity was lost, as a result of the general decline of
culture in the later Roman period and the early Middle Ages. Education
was far more limited than it had been under the Greeks and Romans, and
its content was far less reliable. Moreover, education was primarily de-
voted to the promotion of religion and the salvation of the soul rather
than to training for public life. The greater part of education for public
life was provided in the castle society of the feudal system, where the
young nobles were trained for future knights and lords. The schools
did, however, offer some instruction which was useful in public life,
particularly training as scribes and secretaries. Most of the learned men
were churchmen, especially the monks; for a long time the schools were
almost exclusively in the hands of the church. Even after universities
were established, the churchmen usually retained a dominant control over
their organization and activities.

Education was chiefly devoted to instruction in the trivium. The text-
books were incredibly brief and dull, usually the merest compilations

730 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

which medieval monks had condensed from the works of Greek and
Roman scholars. In addition to these were the textbooks in theology
which had been supplied by the church fathers and medieval theologians.
Most of the teachers in the schools and universities were monks. In
short, the great mass of the people in the Middle Ages were illiterate and
had no literary education whatsoever, except when rarely provided in a
crude form of family instruction. The formal schools were devoted
chiefly to training clergymen for religious practices. Even the training
of lawyers and doctors in the medieval universities was based on abstract
logic and authority rather than upon a scientific study of cases.

One of the most interesting developments in medieval education was
that associated with the rise of universities in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. A French monk, Peter Abelard (1074-1142), showed that an
understanding of logic was absolutely indispensable to a proper mastery
of theology. Since the latter was looked upon as the queen of the sci-
ences, it was necessary to leave no stone unturned to improve its content.
Consequently, the earlier universities were devoted primarily to training
in logic and its accessories, such as grammar and rhetoric. The general
spirit of medieval education is well expressed in the phrase to the effect
that "the sword of God's words is forged by grammer, sharpened by
logic, and burnished by rhetoric, but only theology can use it." Only a
few courses, devoted to training in the art of writing letters, executing
legal forms, drawing up proclamations, making out bills, and the like,
offered much practical and secular education during the medieval period
in undergraduate courses. Graduate instruction in law and medicine
represented a secular element in the educational system, but even these
were usually taught by the same logical method that dominated the-
ology.

The universities were based upon the form of organization already pro-
vided by the medieval industrial corporations or guilds. Indeed, the
very words college and university came from the titles of these medieval
guilds: namely, universitas and collegium. The Bachelor of Arts degree
was given for proficiency in the seven liberal arts, particularly the trivium.
Contrary to the general impression, it was not related to any mastery of
the Greek and Latin languages and literatures. Even instruction in law
and medicine was given according to the same canons and doctrines of
logic that were employed in theology. A great deal of the formal bag-
gage of education — such as the official titles of professors, deans, rectors,
and the like; periodic examinations, academic degrees, academic regalia
and ritual; and the severe and solemn conceptions of academic dignity
and good taste — has all been a heritage from the medieval university.

From medieval times is derived the traditional importance of religion
in education and the religious ends of education. Moreover, churchmen
often remained in charge of schools down to the present century. In
Catholic schools and universities, the clergy, monks, and nuns are in
charge of instruction. Only recently has theology been dislodged by
natural and social science from its position as the queen of the sciences.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 731

From the later Middle Ages and early modern times we derived the
traditional respect for classical languages and literature which dominated
educational philosophy and procedure right down into the twentieth cen-
tury. The first step toward reviving the study of Greek and Roman
literature came in the early fifteenth century, as a healthy revolt against
the sterility and other-worldliness of medieval education. Educational
pioneers like Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446) revived the broad educa-
tional interests of Greece and Rome under the label of the so-called "hu-
manities." The latter were supposed to involve the information necessary
to produce a cultivated man of the world, including physical training.
The classical languages and literatures were regarded as a central feature
in this type of education. They were at first merely the means to a laud-
able end, but in due time they became an end in themselves. Cicero
cast a tremendous spell over the school teachers of the early modern age,
and it was not long before the humanities degenerated into a slavish
linguistic enterprise devoted to a mastery of the involved Latin language
of Cicero. Perhaps the most influential leader in this degradation of the
classics was Johannes Sturm (1507-1589), principal of the famous classi-
cal school at Strassburg. This trend was followed all over western
Europe and the study of the classics became little more than a pedantic
excursion into intellectual slavery, in which the beauties of the classical
literatures and culture were lost sight of amidst the punitive mazes of
classical syntax.

The educational philosophy that accompanied this sterile instruction
was entirely compatible with it: namely, the theory that the will should
be developed through gloom in the schoolroom, accompanied by plenty of
physical punishment. One highly successful teacher, for example,
proudly computed that during his career he had given 911,527 strokes
with a stick, 124,000 lashes with a whip, 136,715 slaps with the hand,
and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of educational
doctrines of great importance for the later progress of a realistic and
socialized education were enunciated. The first outstanding educational
theorist of modern times was Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670),
author of a famous book known as The Great Didactic. He protested
against the tyranny of logic and of classical syntax alike. He believed
that the subject matter of education should be adapted to the mental age
of the child, holding that instruction should be both natural and pleasant.
He was one of the first to demand universal education for both boys and
girls. It was not until the late nineteenth century that these ideals were
rather thoroughly adopted in educational procedure. The eminent phi-
losopher John Locke laid great stress upon rational education as a means
of developing a well-trained mind, and suggested the value of manual
training for the children of the poor. Voltaire assailed both classical
syntax and religious instruction. In the middle of the eighteenth century,
the French reformer Claude Helvetius anticipated the democratic educa-
tors of the nineteenth century by defending the right of the masses to a

732 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

thorough education. He was one of the first to believe that the lower
classes were mentally just as capable as the upper classes.

One of the most influential books ever written in the history of educa-
tion was Rousseau's Smile (1762), a devastating criticism of the sterility
and artificiality of the conventional schools of his day. He believed that
rational education is chiefly a matter of giving a wise direction to the
natural curiosity of the child. He advocated adaption of educational
practice to human nature and stressed universal education. Rousseau's
ideas exerted a great influence on educational reforms in the nineteenth
century. They were introduced into formal pedagogy by Basedow, Pes-
talozzi, Herbart, and Froebel. The education of women found its first
loyal advocate in the French reformer Condorcet (1743-1794). The
revolt against the worship of the classics in the universities was aided by
Christian Thomasius, a Leipzig professor of the early eighteenth century.
A tendency toward realism and utility in education appeared when
technical schools began to be founded, around the middle of the eight-
eenth century. Though most of these advanced theories were not gener-
ally accepted until the nineteenth and twentieth cnturies, many of our
more important educational philosophies date back to the period between
Comenius and Rousseau.

The nineteenth century was a period of remarkable educational fer-
ment and revolution. The power of the church over education was
broken. Public education under state auspices became more usual.
Frederick the Great established a public school system for Prussia, and
in 1794 a law was passed establishing free compulsory education in that
country. France flirted with public education throughout the nineteenth
century and finally established free compulsory education in 1882. Eng-
land lagged behind, and it was not until 1918 that an adequate public
school system was provided there.

The leaders of the struggle for free public education in the United
States were James Gordon Carter, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard.
They were thorough democrats and believed that democracy could not
be successfully operated without free public instruction. Aided by
Carter's legislative efforts, Mann was able to set up the first department
of public instruction in Massachusetts in 1837. This departure was
widely imitated after the Civil War.

But these early reformers, who led in making education available to
the masses, committed one tragic sin of omission. They failed to give
due consideration to the content of the education needed to fit the masses
to operate a democracy. Instead of devising a curriculum suitable to
democratic objectives and experiences, they permitted teachers to con-
tinue a type of instruction which had been worked out by educators of
the fifteenth century for the purpose of instructing the children of the
decadent feudal nobility and the rising urban bourgeoisie. Hence we
failed for a century to train American children for life in a democracy,
and, by the time we realized the mistake, it was all but too late to correct
the error. Fascism was just around the corner.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 733

Teachers were, however, better trained, and were enabled to develop a
more intelligent attitude toward the mentality of the child. Friedrich
Froebel (1782-1852), a disciple of Rousseau, first established the
kindergarten for the training of very young children. Scientific child
study, based upon the new psychology, was introduced by educators sucli
as G. Stanley Hall. Normal schools and teachers> colleges arose to
provide formal instruction in pedagogical science. Sociology showed the
relation of schools and education to a better understanding of human
society and suggested ways of guiding social change in an efficient and
non-violent manner.

Some headway was made in uprooting the stereotyped curriculum
which we had inherited from the Middle Ages and the Humanists. The
vernacular languages and literatures challenged the dominion of the
classics. Natural science gradually forced its way into the universities
and ultimately into the schools. In the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury the social sciences also gained considerable respect in the colleges
and universities, though they were generally neglected in the schools.
Greater flexibility and rationality in education were provided by the elec-
tive system, first introduced in a limited way by President Charles W.
Eliot at Harvard University in 1869. This allowed students to have
some freedom in selecting the subjects they proposed to study.

The twentieth century has brought many interesting innovations in
education. The public support of education has enabled us to build a
physical plant devoted to the instruction of youth. The average high
school building in a small American city is a very impressive structure
compared to the greatest of medieval universities. We have developed
educational machinery which has enabled us to carry on mass education
in an ever more smooth and convenient fashion. Millions of children
now attend school, in the place of the few thousands who were lucky
enough to get an education in earlier centuries.

It is doubtful, however, that mass education is well adapted for the
more capable or the more retarded children. Indeed, it is contended
that mass education even restricts and limits the natural impulses and
capabilities of the average pupil. Hence, we have had experimental
schools devoted both to instruction and to a study of the mind of the child.
Leaders in this movement have been Francis Parker and John Dewey.
An Italian educator, Maria Montessori, went far beyond Froebel in her
study of the child mind and her reforms of the kindergarten system.
Even more sweeping was the development of what is known as the
Progressive Education Movement, a revolt against the formalities and
artificialities of mass education and ordinary school administration.
Progressive education aims to combine sane and realistic instruction
with the provision of an educational experience so pleasant that children
will enjoy attending school. An extreme example of this reaction is the
Dalton system of instruction, where pupils study those subjects they
wish, when and as they desire to do so. The mental hygiene movement
and the scientific study of feeble-mindedness have provided better in-

734 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

struction for retarded children. Mentally defective children can make
commendable progress in the manual arts. A revolution has taken place
in higher education. In the nineteenth century it was a rare person who
had a chance to attend a college or university. Today, there are 1,350,-
000 students in our colleges and universities, about 190,000 being grad-
uated each year.

While far too much of the old stereotyped "liberal" curriculum remains,
there have been important changes in the scope of education in the twen-
tieth century. The social sciences have become more popular in colleges
and universities and are also now being widely introduced into schools.
The evidences of the possible downfall of capitalism and democracy have
led thoughtful persons to consider how far an inadequate educational
system has been responsible therefor. Hence more stress has been laid
upon realistic social science as a means of appraising existing institutions
and of guiding us more safely along the path of social change. But the
social sciences have not progressed rapidly enough or been sufficiently
exploited in education to enable our social institutions to keep pace
with our machinery, thus creating the unfortunate situation we mentioned
at the outset of this chapter.

With the development of Fascism, Communism, and the totalitarian
states in Europe, education has been made a vehicle of political propa-
ganda and of economic change. It is also inculcating an attitude of
super-patriotism which bodes ill for the future peace and safety of
humanity. In Russia we have the first notable instance of an educa-
tional policy and system devoted primarily to the instruction and well-
being of the lower classes.

The foregoing brief survey of the development of education indicates
the major landmarks in the evolution of educational theory and practice
and will enable us to discuss with greater insight the outstanding prob-
lems of contemporary education.

Mass Education: Plant, Administration, and Curriculum

One of the major influences of democracy on education was to bring
about mass education and to make the latter virtually a manifesta-
tion of big business. It became an ever firmer conviction that democracy
requires mass education. This impulse, together with humanitarian
influences, led to the passage of many state laws forbidding child labor.
An ever larger number of children were thus free to attend school. Com-
pulsory education laws were passed, and free education was made the
opportunity of every American child. The expenses of school attendance
were, more and more, taken over by public authorities, often to the extent
of providing children with their textbooks and transportation to and
from school.

Hence, it is not surprising that, by 1936, there were enrolled in Ameri-
can schools and institutions of higher learning approximately 30,600,000
of American youth, with some 1,073,000 teachers required to give instruc-

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 735

tion.2 About one fourth of the whole population of the country is thus,
at any time, primarily absorbed in the business of education. In 1900,
there were only 696,000 pupils in secondary schools, while this number
had jumped to 6,425,000 in 1936. The number of public high schools
increased from 16,300 in 1918 to 25,652 in 1936. The students in Ameri-
can institutions of higher education numbered some 237,000 in 1900, and
1,208,000 in 1936, an increase of about 350 per cent. The population
of the country as a whole had increased only 83 per cent in these 36
years.

While the overwhelming majority of pupils in elementary and second-
ary schools are enrolled in public institutions, there are still a consider-
able number in private schools. In 1933, there were 1,772,428 pupils in
private elementary schools and 280,176 in private secondary schools.
Those enrolled in Catholic elementary schools made up over 95 per cent
of the total, and those enrolled in Catholic secondary schools constituted
over 66 per cent of all attending private secondary schools. The Catholic
control over the minds of millions of school pupils greatly increases the
power and cohesiveness of the Catholic church in the United States. This
situation has been criticized by many students of education, particularly
in view of the fact that the Catholics have also, in many cities, asserted
a dominant influence over the public schools, while endeavoring to keep
as many Catholic children as possible in parochial schools.

The table on page 736, from the Statistical Summary of Education,
1935-36, compiled by the United States Office of Education, give a com-
prehensive picture of the "business of education" in the United States
in 1936.

The graphs on page 737, compiled by the United States Office of Educa-
tion, indicate the remarkable growth of educational activity and enroll-
ment in the United States from 1890 to 1936.

To those familiar with the days of the little red school house, the
village academics, and our quaint, primitive college campuses of a gen-
eration back, the extent and nature of the present physical plant devoted
to American education are almost incredible. The total value of all
public school property rose from 550 million dollars in 1900 to over
$6,731,000,000 in 1936. The total value of all educational property in
the United States in 1936, including private schools and institutions of
higher learning, was $10,115,744,000, with an additional $2,237,340,000
in endowments and trust funds, making a grand total of $12,353,084,000.
The increase in the value of public school property was far greater than
the growth of school enrollment. In 1900 the value of public school prop-
erty per pupil stood at $35, while in 1930 it stood at $241. This increase
in the value of school plant was also accompanied by a remarkable im-
provement in the size and design of school buildings. The most impor-
tant development here was the abandonment of small, especially one-
room, schools, and the building of consolidated or centralized school

2 The highest enrollment was 32,392.749, in 1934.

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738 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

plants. By 1930 there were over 16,000 such consolidated schools, their
number increasing at the rate of about 1,000 a year. There still remain,
however, about 110,000 one-room schools in the country, usually pro-
viding inferior instruction. They are decreasing at a rate of over 3,000
each year.

School buildings are more scientifically and artistically built than ever
before. The modern school building is no longer a sort of cross between
a church and a jail, with respect to architectural design. Nor is it built
without much consideration for light, ventilation, and heating. In our
day, the better school architecture is a combination of good engineering,
architectural talent, and school hygiene. Educational experts arc now
allowed to make suggestions as to proper school design. School buildings
are not only functionally adapted to the needs of instruction, but are also
constructed to insure hygiene, comfort, and convenience. They combine
beauty and utility. School yards are made to provide recreational facili-
ties and proper access to sunlight. In the place of a drab collection of
dingy classrooms and a few office cubicles, we find auditoriums, gym-
nasiums, libraries, shops of many kinds, art studios, suites for health
officers and nurses, cafeterias, rest rooms, and the like.

While our normal schools, colleges, and universities — the institutions
of higher learning — do not represent such a tremendous outlay for plant
as the public schools, they arc, nevertheless, extremely impressive from
the physical point of view. There were 1,690 accredited institutions of
higher learning in the United States in 1938. Some 600 were publicly
controlled, and 1,090 privately controlled. They represented a plant in-
vestment of some $2,556,000,000, with an annual bill for upkeep of about
70 million dollars. Their endowment in 1938 was some $1,721,000,000.
Their receipts, in 1938, amounted to over 550 million dollars, as compared
to a paltry 40 million dollars in 1900, the latter figure even including
additions to endowment during the year 1900, while the 1938 figure is
exclusive of endowment gifts, which amounted to about 50 million dollars
in that year. Expenditures in 1938 were in excess of 545 millions. There
were in 1938 approximately 1,350,000 students attending these institu-
tions of higher learning, with about 190,000 receiving degrees each year.
There were 123,677 full-time faculty members.

Our students in institutions of higher learning thus constitute over one
per cent of the total population of the country, and about 15 per cent of
the youth of college age. At the turn of the century, a college or univer-
sity with a thousand students was a large institution. Today a number
of universities have more than 10,000 full-time students; two have over
15,000 full-time students; and six have a total yearly attendance of full
and part-time students combined of over 15,000 each. New York Uni-
versity has a total registration of over 35,000. In the eastern United
States, most institutions of higher learning, are, aside from normal schools
and teachers colleges, mainly private institutions. In the west, most of
the more important institutions are state colleges and universities.

The physical plant of our larger and richer universities has shown an

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 739

even more remarkable transformation than our public school buildings.
A generation back, many of our campuses possessed buildings of archi-
tectural beauty, purity, and quiet dignity, but few of them were like the
vast and impressive structures that we find on our campuses today.
Some of these are attractively designed; a few are artistic gems, such
as the Ilarkness Quadrangle at Yale, the new Harvard dormitories, the
Michigan Law Court, and Willard Straight Hall at Cornell. Some uni-
versity dormitories present an impressiveness and elegance not matched
elsewhere except in the dwellings of multi-millionaires and great metro-
politan hotels. As one observer has sardonically remarked, the most
elaborate innovations in university architecture have been impressive
and expensive sleeping quarters. The campuses are also embellished by
privately owned fraternity houses, often very expensive and pretentious.
The most striking architectural additions to our campuses in recent years
have been the many buildings erected in state colleges and universities
through federal PWA and WPA aid. Many of these institutions were
previously somewhat dismal. However, many campuses still resemble
architecturally some of our newer minimum security prisons. The ex-
tensive and pretentious architecture of our large universities stands out
in striking contrast to the few and unimpressive buildings which consti-
tute the physical plant of the majority of the more famous institutions of
higher learning in Europe.

The sources of support of our vast institutions of higher learning make
it difficult for the faculty to enjoy true independence of thought in many
subjects, especially in the social sciences. Many private colleges and
universities depend on endowments from the rich. Hence there is little
enthusiasm for faculty criticism of the existing economic order. The
state universities and normal schools are publicly supported, thus making
it often precarious for professors to criticize existing party organizations
and political machinery. The courageous professor may find himself be-
tween the devil of vested economic interests and the deep blue sea of
political pressure and expediency.

The expenditures of our educational system are compatible with the
extent of the plant and the enrollment of pupils. In 1900, the total
expenditures of all public schools amounted to 215 million dollars. By
1936, the figure had grown to $2,232,000,000, or $74.48 per pupil. Even
so, many authorities believe that the latter amount fell far short of what
would be necessary to provide a thoroughly adequate educational system
for American youth. It has been suggested that to bring about such a
result would require an annual expenditure of at least 10 billion dollars.
The most we have ever spent for public education was $2,605,000,000, in
1930. The first table on page 740, from the Statistical Summary of Edu-
cation, 1985-36, presents a comprehensive picture of the expenditures for
education, both public and private, in that year. In 1937-38, the total
annual expenditures for public education in the continental United States
were $2,564,418,760, of which sum $2,233,110,054 went for the support of
elementary and secondary schools.

740

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

EXPENDITURES FOR SCHOOLS REPORTING, 1935-36
(INCLUDES CAPITAL OUTLAY)

Schools

Public

Private

Total

1

2

3

4

Elementary schools (Including kindergarten) . . .
High schools and academies

$1,204,696,632
764,201,566

1 $123,177,705
1 45,411,980

$1,327,874,337
809,613,546

Universities, colleges, and professional schools
(including preparatory departments)2

208,183,284

244,097,836

452,281,120

Teachers colleges and normal schools 3

39,007,811

2,139,083

41,146,894

Schools for delinquents*

5 2,103,053

6 224,326

5 2 327 378

Schools for deaf *

6 870,100

* 1,992,321

8 2,862,511

Schools for blind 4

5 1,020,706

8 352,218

5 1 372,924

Schools for mentally deficient *

5 3,683,919

6 283,318

8 3,967,237

Government schools for Indians * , , .

8,468,076

8 468 076

Total expenditures (continental tlnlted

States)

2,232,235,236

417,678,787

2,649,914,023

Federal Government schools for natives of
Alaska

622,221

622 221

Territorial public school in Alaska

695,162

695 102

1 Estimated.

8 $30,788,863 public, $57,002,946 private, and $87,851,809 total expenditures for auxiliary
enterprises and activities not included.

8 $7,103,877 public, $316,309 private, and $7,480,186 total expenditures for auxiliary enter-
prises and activities not included.

* State and private residential schools only ; city public schools not included.

5 Includes expenditures for instructional purposes, and capital outlay (not included
previously), for schools reporting these items.

a Not including amount spent for tuition in public schools — $653,419.

II

NATIONAL INCOME, TAX COLLECTIONS, AND EXPENDITURES FOR
PUBLIC EDUCATION, 1930 TO 1938

Year ]

[ncome payments
to individuals

j Total tax
collections

Expenditures
for public
education

Per
cent
that
tax
col-
lec-
tions
were
of
total
in-

Per
cent
that
school
ex-
pend-
itures
were
of
total
in-

Per
cent
that
school
ex-
pend- '
itures
were
of tax
col-
lec-

come

come

tions

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1930....
1931

$74,566,000,000
63 459,000 000

$10,266,000,000
9 300 000 000

$2,605,699,000

13.8%
147

3.49%

25.4%

1932....

49,275,000,000

8,147,000,000

2,456,985,000

16.5

4.99

30.2

1933

46,878,000,000

7,501,000,000

16.0

1934

54,138,000,000

8,773,000,000

1,940,133,000

16.2

3.58

22.1

1935. . . .

58,882,000,000

9,731,000,000

16.5

1936

68,051,000,000

10,507,000,000a

2,254,042,000

15.4

3.31

21.5

1937.

71,960,000 000

12,522,000,000a

17.4

1938. . . .

66,259,000,000

14,000,COO,OOOb

2,564,419,000

21.1

3.87

18.3

Sources: Income payments from U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and
Domestic Commerce, Division of Economic Research, Survey of Current Business, Vol. 20,
p. 17-18, October, 1940. Tax collections from National Industrial Conference Board, Cost
of Government in the United States, 1985*1981, p. 33, and Economic Almanac for 1940,
p. 341. Education expenditures from TT. S. Office of Education, Biennial Survey of Educa-
tion, 1928-30, J930-32, 1032-34, 1934-36, 1936-38. (Figures for 1936-38 are advance
data.)

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 741

The second table on page 740, compiled by the Research Division of the
National Education Association, gives a comparative statement of Na-
tional Income, Tax Collections, and Expenditures for Public Education
since the Depression. It reveals the incredibly small proportion of the
national income which is diverted to educational purposes.

In 1930, 54 per cent of school expenditures went for teachers' salaries,
about 25 per cent for current operating expenses, about 3 per cent for
textbooks and other related supplies, approximately 3.5 per cent for
general administration and control, and 16 per cent for upkeep and other
outlays. The following table from the Biennial Survey of Education in
the United States, 1934-1936, reveals the distribution of the various items
in the total expenditures for public education a half-decade later.

DISTRIBUTION OF EXPENDITURES FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION

1934 TO 1936

Current expend!- Total expenditures

tures (Excluding (Including current

Item payments for out- expenses, outlays,

jays, bonds, and and interest)
interest)

General control

4.1

34

Instruction
Salaries

69.2

58.5

Textbooks and supplies

41

34

Operation

10.2

Maintenance

3.9

19.1

Auxiliary agencies

5.9

Fixed charges

2.6

.Total 1CO.O

Capital outlays 8.8

Interest 6.8

Total . . . 100.0

The average salaries of school teachers showed a notable gain from
1914 to 1930. In 1914, the average salary was $525; in 1922, $1,166; in
1930, $1,420; in 1934, $1,227; and in 1938, $1,374. Of course, this gain
over 1914 was in part offset by the increased cost of living, the latter
being 66 per cent higher in 1930 than in 1914.

The administration of American schools has exhibited a great deal of
looseness and diversity. The Federal government has never attempted
to control or been willing to support American public education. The
48 states dominate the public educational system. The state systems as
a whole show a great deal of diversity of control, and there is still further
variation in each local community. A few states, originally led by
Massachusetts and Horace Mann, worked out fairly good systems of
public instruction before 1860, and other states have followed them as
models to a considerable degree. Certain minimum standards are usually
insisted upon by the state, but beyond this, much leeway is given to local
school boards, usually composed of laymen with little educational knowl-

742

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

edge or insight. Least competent of all has been the control of one-room
country school districts by rural trustees, who have usually lacked any
knowledge whatever of educational problems. In over 30 states, the chief
educational executive of the state is still popularly elected, thus putting
the office at the mercy of party politics. In the better-administered
states, there has been a marked trend to appoint the head of the state
school system. Usually he is a man with some expert knowledge of
pedagogy and considerable experience in educational administration.
With the growth in the number and size of American cities, the city school
boards have exerted an ever more important role in American public edu-
cation. City school boards have recently reduced their size and are more
inclined to accept expert advice in educational matters and to delegate
technical responsibilities to trained experts. Most cities have a profes-
sional superintendent of schools. While much remains to be achieved
in the way of securing expert and impartial educational administration in
the United States, the progress along this line in the last forty years has
been almost as notable as the growth of school enrollment and school
plant.

Most of the funds needed to support our school system are raised by
local taxation, though the amount of state aid to public schools has
notably increased in the last quarter of a century. Federal aid has also
grown during this period, but even by 1936 it amounted to only 1.2
per cent of the total. The following table, compiled by the Research

AMOUNT AND PER CENT OF PUBLIC ELEMENTARY- AND
SECONDARY-SCHOOL REVENUE a FROM FEDERAL,
STATE, AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN 1920,
1930, 1934, AND 1938

Unit of
Government

1988

1934

1930

1920

1

2

3

4

5

Amount

Federal
State

$26,535,473
655 996 060

$21,547,938
423 178 215

$7,333,834
353 670 462

$2,474,717
160,084 682

Local

. 1,540,052,863

1,365,553,792

1,726,708,457

807,560,899

Total ... .

$2,222,584,396

$1,810,279,945

$2,087,712,753

$970,120,298

Per Cent

Federal

1 2

12

0.4

0.3

State

29.5

23.4

16.9

16.5

Local

. . . 69.3

75.4

82.7

83.2

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Source: U. S. Department of the Interior, Office of Education, Biennial Survey
of Education, 1918-1920, 1928-1930, 1932-1934, 1936-1938. (Figures for 1936-1938
are advance data.)

a Revenue receipts only. State receipts from permanent funds and from school
lands are included.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 743

Division of the National Education Association, reveals the sources of
the revenue expended for public education from 1920 to 1938, according
to governmental units.

The extension of educational facilities and activities has brought about
a greater demand for competently trained teachers. Normal schools and
state teachers' colleges have increased in number. They have also im-
proved their educational facilities and instruction. Admirably equipped
professional teachers' colleges, in conjunction with the larger universities,
have been provided. The most notable is Teachers College at Columbia
University. Elaborately staffed and extensively attended summer schools
enable teachers to extend their information and keep up to date through
summer study. Many of the better school systems offer promotional
and pecuniary rewards to teachers who carry on their studies in summer
school and extension courses, along with their teaching work. More
teachers have tended to carry on graduate work and professional study,
so that there is a larger body of better trained teachers to choose from
than has previously been the case. There has also been a notable ex-
tension of facilities for the supervision of teaching, thus giving special
aid and counsel to inexperienced or relatively untrained teachers. The
higher salaries paid and the more exacting requirements for teachers have
led to an increase in the relative number of men teachers since the first
World War. In spite of all this, much remains to be done in the way of
improving the training of teachers. Approximately 25 per cent of the
elementary school teachers have had less than two years of education
beyond high school, and over 10 per cent of senior high school teachers
have had less than four years of college work.

Effective teaching and disciplinary methods have been guided largely
by educational psychology and scientific pedagogy. Punitive discipline
has fallen into disrepute in the better schools; emphasis is laid upon
arousing the interest and enthusiasm of pupils. It has been found that
the learning process is facilitated if it is made pleasant enough to enlist
the hearty cooperation of the pupil. School attendance is encouraged by
a number of agreeable and helpful forms of extra-curricular activity,
such as athletics, folk-dancing, and dramatic activities.

While the curriculum, from the elementary school to the graduate
schools of our universities, is still archaic and traditional, it has certainly
been notably improved in the twentieth century. We have already
referred to these changes in connection with the colleges and universities.
The mo$t notable curricular innovation here in the nineteenth century
was the growing attention and respect accorded the natural sciences.
In the twentieth century, the greatest gains have been made by the social
sciences, though these are still inadequately provided for.

In the secondary schools in 1890, most of the instruction was limited
to English, Latin, Greek, French, German, algebra, geometry, physics,
chemistry, and history. In 1930, instruction was offered in approxi-
mately fifty subjects, in the place of the ten that dominated the field
forty years earlier. The decline in the relative attention given to the

744 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

classics and mathematics has been especially marked since the first World
War. The drop in the number of courses offered in German was a
temporary and pathological episode engendered by the first World War.
This prejudice has been revived by the second World War, and it will
probably be some decades before normal and desirable attention will
once more be given to instruction in German.

For many decades, the secondary schools have been considered chiefly as
a preparation for the professions or for college. The secondary schools
are still prostituted to the requirements laid down for college entrance
examinations; however, some secondary schools do prepare students for
life in the twentieth century. This trend is shown by the greater variety
of courses offered and their greater realism. Notable in this respect is
the attention given to the social studies, to manual training and industrial
arts, and to commercial education. The latter has been so extensively
developed in some secondary schools that private commercial schools
have suffered severely. Instruction in manual training in the high
schools was aided by the passage of the Smith-Hughes law in 1917, pro-
viding for federal aid to vocational education under the supervision of
the Federal Board for Vocational Education.

There have naturally been fewer radical changes in the curriculum of
elementary schools. The "three R's" have to be studied in preparation
for further educational work. Nevertheless, the elementary school cur-
riculum has been broadened to include history and the social studies and
various industrial arts. There has also been much experimentation with
more effective and vital types of instruction, in which the studies are
closely related to life situations and the everyday experiences of children.
The health of children of all ages in the public schools is supervised, and
at least some elementary instruction is given in the fundamentals of
health and personal hygiene.

Special classes have been created for handicapped and retarded chil-
dren, including the blind, deaf, subnormal, and feeble-minded. In some
cases school facilities are made available during the entire year, thus
eliminating the waste of plant facilities during the long summer vacation,
the period when the educational plant may actually be operated with a
'minimum of expense. The summer vacation is a hold-over from a farm-
ing economy, in which the farmer needed his children at home to help
him get in his hay and carry on harvesting activities. It is probable
that, within another generation, the protracted summer vacation will be
supplemented by briefer vacations between the quarters of a school
year running through the entire twelve months. Year-around education
in institutions of higher learning was first provided for by President
Charles Rainey Harper at the University of Chicago in 1892. This in-
stitution has always operated on the quarter system instead of the usual
semester plan. Many Western state universities now operate on the
quarter system. The second World War is exerting a powerful influence
in the direction of year- around operation of our colleges and universities,
and the practice may persist in many places in post-war years.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 745

A new type of institution is the junior high school, first launched in
Berkeley, Cal., in 1909, and very widely developed since the first World
War. In 1934, there were over 1,948 junior high schools, with an enroll-
ment of over 1,220,000 pupils. Much time had previously been wasted
in the seventh and eighth grades in perfunctory review of the material
covered in earlier years. Attention is now given to efficient work before
the seventh grade, and then the seventh and eighth grades are trans-
formed into a junior high school, where instruction is given in subjects
which have previously been restricted to the high school curriculum.
There has been much experimentation with the curriculum of the junior
high school, most gratifying being the unusual attention given to the so-
cial studies and industrial arts.

By taking care of subjects previously handled in the high school, the
junior high school makes much more advanced work possible in the senior
high school. The yariety and quality of instruction in the better senior
high schools is far superior to that given in colleges a half century ago.
It is believed by many experts, such as Dean Louis Peckstein of the Uni-
versity of Cincinnati, that in due time the senior high school will supplant
the conventional college, or at least the junior college. If so, this will
bring about a condition resembling that in Europe, where the German
Gymnasium and the French Lycee cover much the same ground as do
the American colleges in the first two or three years of their work. After
the European student finishes work in one of these institutions, he goes
on into the university, which resembles our upper-class years in college
and the work of the university graduate schools.

Junior colleges since the first World War increased from 46 in 1917 to
415 in 1936, with an enrollment of over 102,000. The junior colleges
have taken over the work given in the first two years of the four-year
college. The curriculum, however, is generally more up-to-date and
experimental than the undergraduate curriculum of the conventional
college. The functions and relationships of junior high school, senior
high school, junior college, and four-year college are at present highly
flexible and confused. It will take another generation to solve the prob-
lems they raise, but in the end we can expect a somewhat more rational
distribution of functions and subject-matter.

The progress in human knowledge, the shifts in curricular material,
and the social changes of our day have made it both natural and essential
to consider the problem of adult education. Many persons were denied
the privilege of college education in youth. Even those who had such an
education now find it grievously out of date. Moreover, it is highly
necessary to understand the social changes of our day, the reasons there-
for, and possible means of guiding social change in a manner more bene-
ficial to the mass of mankind. Only adult education can effectively
meet such needs and problems. Certain institutions have been estab-
lished to provide adult education, such as Cooper Union, especially its
People's Institute, and the New School for Social Research in New York
University extension courses, especially those conducted by large

746 EDUCATION IN THE SOCfAL CRISIS

metropolitan universities, have done much to facilitate adult education.
The Public Forum movement has provided for some adult education, in
default of more adequate facilities. Dr. John W. Studebaker, United
States Commissioner of Education, has made a commendable effort to
provide federal resources to support a well-planned forum movement
throughout the United States. Labor organizations and groups have
brought into existence many facilities for the education of the working
class. Particularly worthy of mention are the Rand School of Social
Science in New York City, Labor Temple, also in New York, and the
educational work of the International Ladies Garment Workers.

Finally, there has been a notable extension of the scientific study of
education, with the aim of suggesting better educational methods.
Teachers College at Columbia University, a pioneer in this work, was
much influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Some
of our larger foundations, such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Ad-
vancement of Teaching, the General Education Board, the Rosen wald
Fund, and the Commonwealth Fund, have spent money lavishly in the
study of contemporary education. Unfortunately, such studies often
view the problems of education from the vantage point of the vested
interests in contemporary society. They are more interested in making
education a bulwark of social stability than in developing it as a leading
agent of intelligent social change. Hence they have been limited chiefly
to investigations of the formalities and machinery of education rather
than to a consideration of the role of education in social change and the
relations of education to the social issues of our time.

Despite the extensive educational equipment and activity in the United
States, there are a very large number of Americans who have not made,
or been able to make, adequate use of these facilities. The census of
1940 revealed the fact that 10,105,000 persons over 25 years of age, or
13.5 per cent, had never gone beyond the fourth grade in school. Some
2,800,000, or 3.7 per cent, had never finished one year in school. Less
than a quarter (24.1 per cent) had finished high school. Only 4.6 per
cent were college graduates. The median number of years of school com-
pleted by those over 25 years of age was 8.4, slightly beyond the eighth
grade. General Lewis B. Hershey, head of selective service, stated in
May, 1942, that 250,000 physically fit young men, the equivalent of 15
divisions, had been rejected in the draft because of illiteracy and
"mental backwardness." President Roosevelt was reported to be "startled
by these figures."

Some Outstanding Defects of Contemporary
Education

Education is still administered under a forbidding intellectual atmos-
phere. The punitive and penitential attitude still lies at the heart of
conventional education, however much it may have been repudiated by

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 747

the more progressive types of professional educational psychology. This
attitude towards education was never more crisply, pungently or candidly
expressed than by President George Barton Cutten of Colgate University,
when he observed that: "It doesn't matter what you study, so long as
you hate it."

This type of educational motivation is an outgrowth of at least four
fundamental causes. The first is the orthodox theological assumption
that intellectual virtue can best be assured through its association with
an attitude of solemnity and mental misery.

The second chief cause has been the rationalized defense of anachronis-
tic subjects in the curriculum. Higher mathematics, a most valuable and
practical preparation for applied science and technology, has usually been
retained as a requirement in high schools and in liberal arts colleges.
The classical languages, once the medium of expression for a great civi-
lization, have come down into our day in the form of grammar and syn-
tax, giving but little attention to the actual life, spirit, and achievements
of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The advocates of mathematics and
the classics have been forced to defend them on the ground of their alleged
disciplinary value, with respect to both the intensity of mental effort
demanded and the generally distasteful nature of the subject-matter.

A third cause has arisen from administrative economy and convenience.
In order to standardize educational requirements and achievements and
to grant degrees for approximately the same general volume and level of
achievement, it has been necessary to work out set courses, a schematic
curriculum, and a rigorous set of examinations. In this way, the authori-
ties aim to test the quality of the work being done by students and to
provide for the proper mass promotion of students through the educa-
tional machine.

To these three causes there should be added a fourth, namely, the old
doctrine, drawn from theology and metaphysics, to the effect that the
human will, so-called, can be trained in adequate fashion only if one
is forced to perform many tasks for which he feels a profound disdain and
acute dislike.

All of these attitudes were formulated long before the rise of modern
dynamic and educational psychology. We now know that nothing is
more fundamentally opposed to mental health and stimulating intellectual
life than undue solemnity, psychic misery, and an overdeveloped sense of
personal inferiority. Nor is there any psychological ground whatever for
the belief that special and unique mental discipline can be derived from
the study of a particular subject or group of subjects. If difficulty were
to be the criterion of the value of a study, then we should supplant Greek
and Latin by the languages of the Basque, Eskimo, and Chinese.
Method, rather than subject-matter, creates mental discipline, in so far
as this can be furthered by pedagogical influences. While we cannot
hope to carry on any extensive system of education without at least
a minimum of regimentation and administration, nevertheless, it is all too
easy to convert the machinery for education into the actual goal of educa-

748 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

tion itself. The success of an educational plant is all too often judged
on the basis of its size and the smoothness with which its machinery
operates. The aim of the students is less often the mastery of the subject-
matter of the course than the ability to "get by" in periodic examinations.
Under such conditions the administrative aspect of education becomes a
handicap rather than an aid to the learning process.

Modern psychology tells us that what was once known as "will power"
can be much more certainly and surely attained by proper attention to
the rational motivation of conduct than by forcing one to execute, for
no good reason at all, a series of distasteful acts. When carried into
the educational process, this punitive or penitential conception of mental
discipline and will-training is much more likely to produce hostility to-
wards the subject-matter, to develop paralyzing inhibitions, and to reduce
mental vigor and capacity. Subjection of the youth of the land to the
punitive philosophy of education and to the administrative machinery
necessary to achieve education with the minimum amount of effort and
expense has led young people, for the most part, to regard education, not
as a privilege to be exploited with joy and enthusiasm, but as an imposi-
tion and a bore, to be evaded with the greatest ingenuity, irrespective of
its financial cost to the individual student.

Closely associated with the punitive ideal is the solemnity-complex
which dominates conventional pedagogy. The whole teaching process
is assumed to be a gloomy and earnest affair. Light-hearted enthusiasm
here is in as bad taste as a horse-laugh at a funeral. Hence it is not
surprising that there is little life and vitality in contemporary education.
Akin to this is the notion of academic dignity, partly an outgrowth of
the solemnity-complex and partly a defense of teachers against embar-
rassing questions and intellectual familiarity from students.

It is disheartening to note the lack of real interest and enthusiasm on
the part of most students ; but, to explain it, we cannot rest satisfied with
the hypothesis of the general cussedness of the younger generation. A
good part of the explanation lies in the unfortunate conditioning of the
mind of the student, from the days of the kindergarten to that on which
the official committee accepts a printed dissertation presented for the
Ph.D. degree. Until we supplant the punitive attitude by the recogni-
tion that active interest, rather than mental punishment, is the only
rational motivation of dynamic educational practice, we need not expect
that students in our schools and colleges will give evidence of that
buoyant enthusiasm which is the cherished aspiration of progressive
education.

Another reason for the lack of realism and interest in education and for
the absence of enthusiasm on the part of students is the all too prevalent
lack of special aptitude and gusto on the part of teachers. The teachers
in public schools usually have some formal training in pedagogy and the
psych9logy of education, but they are rarely put through any aptitude
tests to determine their fitness for the career of instructing youth. Unless
they are miserably incompetent in the matter of elementary classroom

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 749

discipline, they can usually hold their jobs, however stultifying their
influence over pupils. Many, especially young women teachers, have no
deep professional interest in teaching, and plan to teach only until they
can find some other type of work or get married.

Personal and professional aptitude is even more lacking among college
and university teachers. Many professors are learned and charming
men and many are well fitted to do research and write books in their
fields; but there is little or nothing in the requirements for the Ph.D.
degree which has the most remote relation to capacity to impart informa-
tion to students in competent and enthusiastic fashion. No professional
group in modern society is so ill-prepared, indeed unprepared, for its
responsibilities and duties as are teachers in institutions of higher learn-
ing. Some are superb teachers, but, if so, it is only a happy accident.
Many go into college and university teaching solely because there is noth-
ing else for them to do or because it offers a life of dignity, social distinc-
tion, relative leisure, and opportunity for scholarly research and reflection.
It is obvious that bored or incompetent instructors cannot do much to
arouse enthusiasm for learning on the part of students.

So long as our schools remain organizations given over chiefly to regis-
tering the disappointing effects of teaching rather than to assuring prog-
ress in learning, they will remain places which are mainly efficient in
producing and recording educational failures. This general point of view
was well expressed by the late James Harvey Robinson in his discussion
of the motives and philosophy of the New School for Social Research*,
which he helped to found some years back as an institution designed to
achieve educational ideals such as he had in mind:

Teaching and learning are assumed to go hand in hand. But no one who is not
professionally pledged to this assumption can fail to see that teaching commonly
fails to produce learning, and that most we have learned has come without teach-
ing, or in spite of it. The gestures and routine that make up teaching are
familiar enough and can easily be acquired. Recitations, lectures, quizzes,
periodical examinations, oral and written, textbooks, readings, themes, problems,
laboratory work, culminating in diplomas and degrees cum privilegiis ad eos
pertinentibus, form the daily business of tens of thousands of teachers and
hundreds of thousands of boys and girls in thousands of smoothly working
institutions dedicated to the instruction of the young. Teaching in all its various
manifestations can readily be organized and administered.

As for learning, that is quite another matter. It is highly elusive and no one
has yet discovered any very secure ways of producing it. Being taught and
learning are obviously on different psychological planes; they involve different
processes and emotions; are subject to different stimuli and ppring from different
impulses. Our "institutions of learning" are essentially institutions for teaching.
Teaching is easy but learning is hard and mysterious, and few there be that attain
to it. It seldom forms the subject of discussion in faculty meetings where it is
tacitly assumed that pupils and students rarely wish to lenrn, and that the main
business in hand is to see that those obviously indifferent to being taught are
suitably classified and promoted or degraded according to the prevailing rules of
educational accountancy. . . . 8

» The Human Comedy, Harper, 1936, pp. 361-362; see also below, pp. 769 ff., 777-
778.

750 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

Another outstanding defect of contemporary education is our anti-
quated and archaic curriculum which, in spite of changes in the last half
century, is still out of accord with the realities of contemporary life and
the needs of the society of our day.

In most of our plans for the reform of the educational curriculum we
refuse frankly to face the fact that much of our present-day educational
philosophy and most of the curriculum represent a heritage from an
ancient past, which is as ill-adapted to modem thought and needs as the
ox-cart or the clepsydra. Consequently, most educational progress con-
sists in attempting to engraft upon an archaic substructure an incongruous
set of highly modern educational notions and a variety of novel subjects
in the curriculum. The average high school or college of today is not
unlike an ancient oriental ox-cart, to which have been subsequently
attached fragments from Greek and Roman chariots, armor plate from
the coat of mail of a medieval knight, the top from an early modern
stagecoach, pneumatic tires, an automobile steering-gear, an airplane
propeller, and a radio.

Such a combination as this, if actually exhibited to the average college
president or dean, a conventional professor of pedagogy, or the usual run
of school superintendents, would cause those normally solemn individuals
to burst into hilarious laughter. They fail, however, to realize that the
educational system and institutions over which they preside with such
dignity and satisfaction are a no less amazing museum-piece, in which
even the highly modern equipment is, to a degree, paralyzed by the
anachronisms to which it is attached. It is rarely understood that, if one
desires a modern educational machine, he must scrap the whole exhibit
and build anew, on the basis of contemporary needs and knowledge, in
exactly the same way that a technician, desiring an airplane, builds an
airplane, and does not start by attaching a propeller and a gasoline tank
to a Roman chariot.

The objectives of a large proportion of the older subjects in the curricu-
lum can scarcely be sustained in the light of modern knowledge. Those
subjects relating to religion have come down from the primitive oriental
and riTedieval notion that the basic purpose of education is to make clear
the will of God or the gods to mankind. The Greeks and Romans added
to these primitive and oriental views great emphasis on the value of train-
ing in rhetoric and argumentation (public speaking) in order to provide
the technique for achieving success in the political life of the classical
period. The Middle Ages added a renewed emphasis upon religion and
the supernatural in education. The Humanists contributed the notion
that the classical languages embody the finest flower of secular learning
and are unparalleled modes of literary expression. The invention of
printing made possible the worship of the printed page. The democratic
enthusiasm of the last century helped to establish the principle that
everybody is entitled to an education and is equally capable of participat-
ing in a complete system of educational activity.

Scarcely one of these contentions can be successfully defended in the

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 751

light of our present knowledge and needs. We can hardly hope to ascer-
tain the will of the gods. Statesmen are in much greater need of a
knowledge of the processes of government and of the statistical facts
relative to social problems than they are of an oratorical technique which
will enable them to avoid the split infinitive or the dangling participle or
to quote impressive passages from the ancient masters of oral prose. A
man with Robert Moses' equipment must be regarded as better fitted to
deal with the problems of government than the most exquisite orators of
our own or earlier periods. The classics, far from being adequate to
serve as the pivotal item in the whole curriculum of higher learning, really
constitute but a minor element in the field of aesthetics. Modern differ-
ential biology and psychology, as well as educational experience, prove
clearly enough that a considerable portion of mankind is unfitted by
reason of defective endowment to participate in the higher ranges of
educational endeavor.

It is hardly unfair to say that organized education today is really more
interested in perpetuating the ignorance of the past than in acquainting
the youth of the land with new and saving knowledge. The greater part
of education in the past has been devoted to setting off its products from
the rest of society, as either gentlemen or churchmen. Hence it is not
surprising that, as Horace Kallen has suggested, our educational heritage
provides a distraction from life rather than a realistic preparation to live
successfully in the twentieth century.

We are living in the greatest social crisis in history and in one so com-
plicated that we need, as never before, the counsel of organized intelli-
.gencc, which should be another name for education. Yet education
brings riiore inertia and confusion than clarity of vision and courage of
leadership. The social sciences are inadequately developed and pro-
moted. Their subject-matter is partially irrelevant and their tone is
conservative. With democracy in headlong retreat throughout the
modern world, we still refuse to provide realistic education in the princi-
ples of citizenship under democratic institutions. The evils which are
sinking the ship of state are resolutely obscured. With one family out
of every six going on the rocks and winding up in a divorce court, we still
shy off from thoroughgoing sex education which might make the
monogamous family something of a success.

Above all, we are opposed to so-called practical subjects. It is almost
a dogma in respectable educational circles that anything which is directly
useful to humanity cannot be truly educational. Any suggestion that we
introduce more practical subjects in institutions of higher learning is
usually vehemently opposed as only a first step toward transforming them
into institutions for manual training. Indeed, in one fairly progressive
women's college, known to the writer, exactly this objection was brought
forward when it was proposed to outline a course of study designed to be
helpful to the college graduates who hoped to become mothers and engage
in family activities. No new subjects were proposed. All that was
suggested was a logical organization of reputable courses already being

752 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

taught, but outlined in a natural sequence, designed to constitute four
years of profitable academic work. It was denounced by the ethereal
pedants on the faculty as a mere "housekeeping major," a^nd regarded as
akin to instruction in blacksmithing and cheese-making. At least half the
subjects now being taught in our schools and universities have no useful
relationship to life in the twentieth century. They may not be directly
harmful in themselves, but they prevent adequate attention from being
given to subject-matter upon which the future destiny of humanity very
literally depends.

Another source of weakness and waste in contemporary education has
been an inevitable outgrowth of mass education. The most economical
and convenient way of carrying on mass education is to try to put all the
children in the schools and colleges through the same curriculum and to
handle them by the same educational machinery. The very mental tests
which the educational experts have done so much to provide clearly re-
veal the futility of such procedure. They make it clear that the school
population varies in intellectual capacity from morons to geniuses.
Further, the vocational tests which educators have been improving during
the last generation indicate the wide variety of special talents which it
should be the function of education to recognize and encourage. Yet, we
still attempt to prescribe the same subjects and modes of instruction for
the moron, the average student, and the genius, for the student with a
literary flourish and one with mechanical genius. While we have begun
to introduce special classes for extremely handicapped and retarded
children, we have only scratched the surface of the problem of differen-
tiating education according to special abilities, functions, needs, and
personal ambitions. Little has been done" to take into account the special
requirements and opportunities of the mentally superior children. Our
failure to differentiate between those who simply go to college because
it is the current style to do so and those who enter higher education be-
cause they really wish to learn something confuses our entire system of
higher education.

In our effort to provide administrative machinery to facilitate mass-
education, we have brought about a system that turns out duplicate
models of mental docility, instead of promoting the growth of intellectual
alertness and curiosity. The original and independent teacher finds
himself restricted on every hand by the machinery of education. The
progressive education movement has been, largely, a revolt against the
limitations upon dynamic education imposed by the whole complex of
administrative machinery.

The examination bogey also restricts mental alertness and enthusiasm.
We must have some tests wherewith to determine the promotion of stu-
dents in the educational process; but we have carried these to such an
extreme that "education" is often a matter of successfully passing peri-
odic examinations. Little attention is given to the quality of learning
and to the amount of useful information that may remain in the mind of
the student after he has passed an examination. Moreover, the fears

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 753

and inhibitions associated with examinations all too often impair the
mental activity of even capable students.

Concentration upon frequent formal examinations as the chief test
of the educational progress of students is one of the most deadly of
pedagogical methods. Sooner or later, a means becomes transformed
into an end. What is at best only a highly imperfect method of measur-
ing intellectual advancement becomes the essence of the educational
process. The better students look upon educational success as something
which is demonstrated by an imposing string of "A's," while the mob
regards the summum bonum as attained when they make the requisite
number of "C's." There is no necessary connection between true learning,
on the one hand, and the process of cramming information to secure a
high grade in formal examinations, on the other. To the real student,
there is often little true joy in the learning process until he has passed
beyond the examination nuisance — that is, beyond the scope and control
of official education. The writer has heard many testify, in a semi-
humorous and semi-ironical and embittered fashion, to the fact that they
obtained little enjoyment from their educational life until after they
had completed all the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy.
A spirited criticism of the net result of excessive educational machinery
and mass education has been offered by Porter Sargent, a professional
student of elementary and secondary education and editor of the im-
portant annual, A Handbook of Private Schools, in his article on "The
Crime of Teaching" in the Yankee Magazine. It is, perhaps, slightly
overdrawn, but Mr. Sargent does put his finger upon one of the more
serious defects of contemporary mass-education:

It's in America and England that the schoolhouse and the bughouse have
become the conspicuous blots on the landscape. Wherever a few children are
gathered together there's a schoolhouse. The asylums lie about the great centers
of population like the outlying forts about Paris. Together they are as charac-
teristic of our culture as the Gothic cathedral of medieval Europe, the columned
temple of Greece or the stupa and pagoda of Buddhist countries. Whether in
New England or Southern California, choice hilltop spots are crowded with great
institutional brick piles — our schools or our asylums. Before the gaze of heaven
we parade the human sacrifices of our civilization. The ultimate causes are
deep hidden for shame. And like the Aztecs, it's the flower of our youth we
sacrifice — geniuses, men of promise like Clifford Beers, founder of the mental
hygiene movement. The "untutored" mind escapes. Those who go to the
asylums and the prisons have passed through the sehoolhouses. And yearly an
increasing percentage of the schoolhouse product goes on to the bughouse.4

According to Mr. Sargent, a Harvard alumnus, it is frustration which
leads to both educational futility and the great increase in mental disease.
Education, as conducted today, is little more than organized frustration
for the youth of the land. It is almost true that the more highly educated
a person is, the more frustrated he is likely to be:

Frustration is the one thing characteristic of the present generation. It is a
frustrated world we live in. We haven't the healthy extrovert attitude toward

4 Loc. cit., Yankee, Inc., Winter, 1938.

754 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

life that was characteristic of the Elizabethans and their time when children had
less schooling. Today we rob the child of his joy in this wonderful world into
which he has been born. We dull his edge. We bring about frustration. In-
creasingly for several generations we have been doing this and now as a people
we are frustrated, we have nowhere to go, no aims, no purposes, no ideals, no
drive. The academic sophisticates rather pride themselves on their supercilious
cynicism. The more highly educated a group, the more frustrated they appear.
Look at a gathering of old Harvard grads, bald, jowled, clewlapped, stoop-
shouldered, pot-bellied. They are dulled, disillusioned. There is no sparkle,
no fire. They are a tamed, dispirited lot, without zest for life.

It is Mr. Sargent's thesis that education is *' misnomer for the pro-
cedure of the present school system. Our pupils are sent to school but
not educated:

The people we see about us today have been schooled, not educated. They
have been taught what someone thought they ought to know, deprived of what
they hungered for. No wonder they are frustrated. Twelve years of schooling,
four years of college, four years of professional training, two years of interneship
or apprenticeship in office or factory — twenty-two years of teaching and educa-
tion or frustration before they are permitted to do anything. The only way a
child during the last few generations could get an education was to play truant —
and he got licked for that.

The unfortunate characteristics of excessive educational machinery and
mass education extend to our institutions of higher learning as well as to
our schools. Much critical literature has been produced on the so-called
factory system in higher education. It must be obvious to all thoughtful
and candid observers that the increase in the size of our institutions of
higher learning has brought about a remarkable transformation in ideals
and methods since the day when the perfect college was one symbolized
by Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a half-dozen exuberant students
on the other.

It is necessary, at the outset, in the interest of accuracy and logic, to
distinguish between those aspects of modern university life which arise
chiefly from the increased size of institutions and those which have grown
Dut of contemporary cultural transformations or have proceeded from
present-day fads. The tendency towards swarming to institutions of
higher learning, indifference to serious intellectual endeavor, abnormal
consumption of liquor, obsession with football, scouring the countryside
in high-powered cars, and freak subjects in the curriculum, may have
been in some cases intensified by the factory system in education, but
they cannot honestly be said to have been produced solely by large-scale
higher education or to be inevitable products of it. We must confine
ourselves to those situations which have inevitably arisen out of the
overgrown state of many large universities.

It is clear that, in the first place, our larger educational factories must
be primarily places for teaching rather than learning, unless the endow-
ment and income are sufficiently great to enable classes to be broken up
into small units and to provide really competent and experienced teach-
ers for all such groups. Under normal circumstances, a maximum of in-
struction must be dispensed with, a minimum of effort and expense.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 755

This leads to overcrowded lecture courses, the enrollment sometimes run-
ning as high as several thousand in a single course. Later, these mobs
are broken up into small section-meetings, where they are more or less
mechanically quizzed in a routine fashion by cub instructors. The latter
aim to discover the talents of the students as human parrots, measured by
their ability to reproduce the lecture material dispensed by the depart-
mental orator-in-chief, or by their facility in mastering the required
reading, uniformly assigned to all students in the course. If the subject
is natural science, the quizzes on subject-matter are supplemented by
the laboratory section meetings, likewise presided over by tyro instruc-
tors and assistants who administer the system through enforced compli-
ance with the manual of procedure prepared by the chief or by an
eminent professional colleague. In this way adolescent Newtons,
Faradays, Pasteurs, Darwins, Helmholtzes, Einsteins, and Michelsons
are supposed to be created en masse.

All of this group instruction is, for the most part, administered in
accordance with the precepts of the penitential and punitive educational
philosophy, based upon the conception of education as a matter of
assigning tasks — mostly unpleasant — and exacting rigorous compliance
with such requirements. There is a general ignorance of the fact that
ardent interest in the task at hand, conceived in a rational and practical
manner, is the only real key to educational achievement and school
hygiene alike. There is little possibility, under such conditions, of
arousing student interest in the subject-matter, either by the inspiration
growing out of close personal contact with a great master or through a
glowing and enthusiastic type of personal exposition of academic mate-
rials. -The whole matter tends to become formal, unreal, artificial, un-
pleasant, and repellent.

Not only is instruction in the factory type of university for the most
part large-scale, formal, impersonal, and punitive. This, of necessity,
carries with it great reliance upon official regimentation, an elaborate
system of records, resort to frequent and standardized examinations, and
general trust in formal method and procedure rather than in creating
an inquiring spirit. This standardization often goes beyond determining
the status and promotion of the students through their years in college,
and even applies to their teachers as well. Some of our larger universi-
ties base the tenure and promotion of their instructors upon the number
of printed pages which they have published during any year or group of
years.

Large-scale education also has its inevitable effect upon the general
intellectual and social life of the students. There is little opportunity for
diversified and intimate acquaintanceship. There can be little common
spirit or true institutional appreciation, except in such superficial irrele-
vancies as hysterical loyalty to football teams or participation in class
festivities. There is no possibility of living any real university social
life, with the consequence that the financially more fortunate ones drift
into snobbery and fraternity cliques, while the less fortunate swarm about

756 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

in temporary and aimless gregariousness or retire into embittered isola-
tion. The whole situation makes for artificiality and distraction, and
there is little which leads to calm and mature reflection or stimulating
intimacy of spirit. The faculty is affected as well as the students.

Closely related to mass education and the customary regimentation in
the process has been a tendency to overstress the custodial function of
our schools and colleges. As a result of our material civilization and
its distractions, the educational system is becoming a hierarchy of
dignified institutions of child-care and supervision. A generation or so
ago, the home was the center of social, educational, and recreational life.
There was little incentive to seek recreation and distraction elsewhere
and little opportunity to clo so if the inclination arose.

Today the movies, golf courses, automobiles, dance halls, night clubs,
theaters, country clubs, and the like, offer allurement, even to respectable
classes. Children are a care and a social liability to those who want
to participate in such social and recreational activities, and this burden
cannot be fully removed by turning children over to the care of maids
and tutors in the home. Today many parents engage in remunerative
work that takes them out of the home for most of the day. Conse-
quently, in addition to the public schools and state universities, we have
developed a great hierarchy of institutions, from the day nursery through
the private schools for boys and girls, to preparatory schools and col-
leges. These receive and safely care for children who, while not unloved,
prove an annoyance and special cross to parents who want freedom from
domestic responsibilities. Many parents have fostered the development
of elaborate summer camps for boys and girls, which relieve them of
parental responsibility during the non-school months as well.

Parents do not always recognize their desire for unencumbered free-
dom. They usually rationalize their action on the ground that residen-
tial schools and camps offer better facilities for their children than can be
obtained at home. The same changes in civilization that have made it
desirable to be rid of children have brought that increase in prosperity
which has made it possible to send progeny to expensive custodial insti-
tutions. Parents who do not want or are unable to send their children
a,way before college years still hope that the institutions of higher learn-
ing to which they consign their offspring will be places of safe custody.

Thus the chief function of education, in the minds of many parents, is
the custodial function. Children in preparatory schools and colleges are
especially hard to manage ; they simply radiate "problems" due to puberty
and adolescence. The parents are glad to pass on the responsibility for
their control to the educational institutions. The schools and colleges
accept the custodial responsibility and formulate their rules accordingly.
Regimentation and administration are controlled much more by con-
siderations incident to successful custody than by concern for intellectual
stimulation. There are rules about residence and absences which, in
some cases, are almost as rigorous as those in the more liberal cor-
rectional institutions.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 757

The success of a college is often measured by its capacity for the safe
segregation of youth. If a college turns out class after class with few or
no casualties, scandals, or disappearances, even though the pretense to
educating the students is obviously a sham, the administration is praised
as brilliantly performing its pedagogical duties and fully discharging its
social responsibilities. On the other hand, should a courageous, ener-
getic, and stimulating college president develop some degree of intellec-
tual interest on the part of the students and actually educate a few of
them, his achievement would immediately be nullified in parental opinion
if one eccentric or overbuoyant student should escape or involve the
college in some scandal, indicating possible laxity in discipline. It is a
situation not unlike that in the penal institutions, where the warden
is rated by his success in the prevention of escapes.

The efficiency and status of college professors are also primarily deter-
mined by their success in promoting the record of the institution as a
place for safe segregation. A professor, however boring, monotonous,
and unstimulating to the students, is a valued faculty member if he
creates a quiescent attitude on the part of the students and, by his
somnolent influence, reduces the probability of student thoughtfulness,
scepticism, recalcitrance, or insurrection. Let a brilliant, active professor
stir his students to independence of thought and action, and he becomes
a challenge to the whole system of institutional regimentation and will
likely be let out at the earliest opportunity.

Besides putting the custodial function of a college far ahead of its edu-
cational responsibility, most parents are even fearful of real education.
H. L. Mencken has ironically said that nothing is so shocking to a parent
as to discover intelligence in his child, and nothing could be more repug-
nant to him than to envisage sending his child to an institution that
proposed actually to educate him, namely, to make him more intelligent.

One of the major obstacles to making education a potent vehicle of
social enlightenment is the influence of tradition, habit, and the conserva-
tive longing for absolute certainty in human affairs. For nothing does
the human mind yearn more persistently than for a sense of safety and
assurance amidst the problems forced upon us by the facts of the external
world, the nature of our own biochemical equipment, and association with
our fellows. We have a deep-seated desire to know just what we should
do and how and when we should do it. Dogma, routine, and habit are
not only great time-savers, but are also indispensable to the creation of
that enviable feeling of intellectual sufficiency, moral certainty, and eco-
nomic security which characterizes the person who finds himself per-
fectly adjusted to what he regards as the best of all possible worlds.

Down to the twentieth century, it was possible for the intellectual
classes to possess some close approximation to that feeling of omniscience
and security for which we all seek. Primitive folklore, mythology and
mores, and later the dogmas of religion, politics, economics, and educa-
tion, were able to create for man a world of such conceptual simplicity
that one could believe that he possessed the totality of saving knowledge

758 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

with respect to every problem confronting man. In our day, however,
the achievements in modern natural science, biblical scholarship, critical
thought, and social science have shown that the conceptions of the cosmos,
the world, man and human society upon which the older dogmas rested,
were an almost complete illusion. If this be true, then the dogmas them-
selves possess no more validity than the fictitious world order from which
they were derived.

Further, and even more disconcerting, modern science and scholarship
have shown that the physical cosmos is so complex, extensive, and
dynamic that we can never hope to possess absolute certainty with re-
spect to anything. One of the basic laws in modern physics is Werner
Heisenberg's law of indeterminacy which, as one commentator has ob-
served, implies that "the only certainty in the physical world is uncer-
tainty." The remarkable progress in the study of man and human
society from the angles of mechanistic biology, physiological chemistry,
comparative and dynamic psychology, and the various social sciences has
likewise proved that man and his culture present a complexity which can
no longer be explained within the categories of the older religious and
metaphysical rationalizations.

In other words, after having taken away from a person the neat antique
dogmas, done up in mental tinfoil and properly distributed in the nice
cabinet of intellectual pigeonholes, which contains his equipment of con-
ventional knowledge, there are no carefully assorted and clearly tabulated
packages of learning to hand back in return. Indeed, we must even
give the cabinet of pigeonholes a well-placed kick. There is considerable
grief about so much "tearing down" of ancient beliefs without "putting
anything in their place," but this begs the whole question. The first
essential of the modern outlook is to recognize that the only thing which
can replace the older cut-and-dried dogmas is a new mental attitude —
namely open-mindedness, persistent cerebration, scientific method, and
hard study, in the hope of ultimately discovering some final working
approximations to truth. This point has been emphasized with charac-
teristic charm and lucidity by Carl Becker:

This effort to find out what it's all about is, in our time, more difficult than
jver before. The reason is that the old foundations of assured faith and familiar
custom are crumbling under our feet. For four hundred years the world of
education and knowledge rested securely on two fundamentals which were rarely
questioned. These were Christian philosophy and Classical learning. For the
better part of a century Christian faith has been going by the board, and
Classical learning into the discard. To replace these we have as yet no founda-
tions, no certainties. We live in a world dominated by machines, a world of
incredibly rapid change, a world of naturalistic science and of physicp-chemico-
libido psychology. There are no longer any certainties either in life or in thought.
Everywhere confusion. Everywhere questions. Where are we? Where did we
come from? Where do we go from here? What is it all about? The freshmen
are asking, and they may well ask. Everyone is asking. No one knows; and
those who profess with most confidence to know are most likely to be mistaken.
Professors could reorganize the College of Arts if they knew what a College of
Arts should be. They could give students a "general education" if they knew

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 759

what a general education was, or would be good for if one had it. Professors are
not especially to blame because the world has lost all certainty about these
things.5

Moreover, much of the grief at the tearing-down process is misplaced.
There is often much constructive service in the process of tearing down
and taking away. No one would urge a surgeon to replace an inflamed
appendix by a malignant tumor. No one mourns because we have dis-
rupted many of the beliefs and practices held sacred among primitive
peoples. Several centuries from now, in all probability, the cultivated
classes will view the most "sacred" beliefs and institutions of the mid-
twentieth century much as we now regard cannibalism, the couvade, and
the suttee. Indeed, one of the results of modern thought has been to
render the very concept of "sacredness" an obstructive anachronism.
Nobody has stated this better than did James Harvey Robinson in the
following paragraph:

One of the great obstacles to a free reconsideration of the details of our human
plight is our tendency to regard familiar notions as "sacred"; that is, too assured
to be questioned except by the perverse and wicked. This word sacred to the
student of human sentiment is redolent of ancient, musty misapprehensions. It
recalls a primitive and savage setting-off of purity and impurity, cleanness and
uncleanness. . . . Simple prejudices or unconsidered convictions are so numer-
ous that the urgence and shortness of life hardly permit any of us, even the most
alert, to summon all of them before the judgment seat. Then there are the
sacred prejudices of which it seems to me we might become aware and beware, if
we are sufficiently honest and energetic. History might be so rewritten that it
would at least eliminate the feeling that any of our ideas or habits should be
exempt from prosecution when grounds for indictment were suggested by ex-
perience.6

It was inevitable that this unique situation would, in due time, impinge
upon the intellectual life of college circles. In the period intervening
between the college days of the parents of the present generation of college
students and those of their children there have been more changes
of an unsettling nature than in the thousand years which separated
Charlemagne from Abraham Lincoln. This fact has, however, been slow
in penetrating the thinking of college circles. Only rarely have even the
professors achieved approximate contemporaneity in their intellectual
outlook. A goodly proportion of college teachers have retained unaltered
the dogmas and convictions which they acquired during the generation in
which they attended college. Others are intense specialists who do good
work in their particular narrow lines of research but lack social orienta-
tion and public interests. Few college teachers become such because of
comprehensive enlightenment or on account of the desire to bring about
such a beatific state on the part of their students. The real process of
becoming a professor is not unlike that described by Clarence C. Little,
ex-President of the University of Michigan, in the remarks attributed to

B Letter in Cornell Sun.

0 The Human Comedy, Harper, 1936, pp.

760 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

him in a speech delivered some years ago before the National Student
Federation:

Most professors reach their positions through a curious process. After they
receive their pass-key to that intellectual garret of Phi Beta Kappa, the devil,
in the form of some friend, whispers into their ears that they should teach. They
often accept the suggestion, and after securing their master's degrees, they write
a thesis on some such subject as "The Suspenders of Henry VIII" and then are
qualified to teach. A thesis subject is by definition a subject about which no one
has ever cared to write before.

This type of man is then put in charge of a group of freshmen, and he generally
has a great disdain of their consummate ignorance, while they on their part have
a great disdain for his consummate learning. Sometimes someone springs up
among the freshmen with the declaration that the suspenders of Henry VIII are
the most important things in the world. Immediately, the professor picks him
up from the bog of ignorance in which the rest of the freshmen lie and starts him
on the path to another professorship.

When, however, there is a teacher who is in reasonable rapport with
the contemporary age and is possessed of at least average powers of
articulation, the shocking power of his reflections and observations is
inevitably great, even though he does nothing more than synthesize the
rudimentary platitudes of twentieth-century knowledge. This disturbing
influence need not be due in any sense to special ability or peculiarly
seductive pedagogy on the part of the instructor. It is merely an indi-
cation of the wide gulf which separates us from the assured knowledge
of the year 1900. When one calmly reflects upon the reality and extent
of this gulf, he is likely to marvel, not at the frequency with which
alarmed parents endeavor to tone down the lectures of teachers who are
endeavoring to dispense information and attitudes of a contemporaneous
vintage, but rather that such efforts to intimidate university instructors
and executives do not occur much more often. The custodial tendency
in education, which we examined above, helps to intensify this desire
to protect youth from disconcerting advances in human knowledge.

The influence of conservatism over American education has also been
extended by the prevailing tendency to gather our college and university
boards of trustees from among leaders in business and finance. Since
•our higher learning has become a big-business affair with regard to plant,
income, and expenditures, it has been felt that only leaders in business
and finance can competently direct the policies of our colleges and univer-
sities. It has been particularly maintained that they are absolutely in-
dispensable, in order to raise endowments and other funds needed for
current operating expenses. No doubt the fact that the ultimate power
in the realm of higher learning resides in men drawn from business and
finance has made for conservatism in university policies and in classroom
instruction alike. The illusion that businessmen and financiers make the
best trustees and are indispensable has been colorfully punctured by
H. L. Mencken in his comment on "Babbitt in the Athenaeum":

Of the superstitions prevailing in the United States, one of the most curious
is to the effect that businessmen make good university trustees. Not infre-

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 761

quently — nay, usually — it is carried to the length of holding that they make the
only good ones.

It would be hard to imagine anything more untrue. In fact, very few men
trained to business seem to be capable of grasping what a university is about:
they constantly assume that it is simply a kind of railroad, or a somewhat odd
and irrational kind of rolling mill. That it differs as radically from such enter-
prises as a string quartette differs from a two-ton truck, or an archangel from, a
United States Senator, or Betelgeuse from a baseball — this seems to be quite
beyond their comprehension.

Sometimes one hears that trustees must be businessmen because running a
university costs a great deal of money, and they alone can raise it. But there
is no proof of this last in the record. Most American universities, though they
are run by businessmen, are always on the edge of bankruptcy, and if it were not
for occasional windfalls they would slip over. The trustees seldom have any-
thing to do with bringing down these windfalls; they are fetched by members of
the faculty — either by making a noise in the world professionally, or by making
a noise otherwise. In one of the greater American universities a single member
of the faculty has raised more money during the past thirty years than all of
the trustees combined.

I believe that the first American university which bars businessmen — and
especially bankers — from its board will leap ahead so fast that in five years the
rest will be nowhere. Let it substitute any other class of men it pleases — movie
actors, Turkish bath rubbers, steamboat captains, astrologers, bootleggers, even
clergymen. No matter which way it turns it will be on the up-and-up.

Businessmen unquestionably have their virtues, and no sensible person would
deny their great value to society. Many of them, in their private capacities, are
highly intelligent. But there is something in their make-up which makes them
distrust and misunderstand a university as they distrust and misunderstand the
Bill of Rights. They are as out of place in the grove of Athene as they would be
in the College of Cardinals.

The twentieth century has produced a striking development which
either distracts attention from truly educational matters or is directly
antagonistic to the true interests of education. We refer to intercol-
legiate athletics, particularly football. While the abuses associated with
these athletic enterprises have been mainly limited to colleges and uni-
versities, they have now become very widely extended to our secondary
and preparatory schools. When the average American thinks of Yale,
Harvard, and Princeton, he is more likely to recall their football teams
and star players than their faculties and scholastic achievements.
Famous football players like Red Grange and Tom Harmon figure far
more in the public eye than even the most eminent university president,
such as the late Charles W. Eliot. Star athletes make much better copy
than the most distinguished scholar, not even excepting Einstein himself.
When Fortune made its notable survey of the University of Chicago, it
stressed as an amazing fact the allegation that the students were more
interested in scholarly controversies than in the standing of their football
team. This was held to be almost unique in American higher education.
Unfortunately, the editors of Fortune were probably correct. Finally,
the status of colleges is determined quite as much by their athletic
achievements as by the distinction and scholarly products of their faculty.

College students are generally thrilled more by athletic victories than
by any other events that take place on our college campuses. Good

762 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

athletes are the heroes of every campus. Scouts visit high schools and
preparatory schools and urge promising young athletes to enroll in a
particular college. Many of these athletes are paid, directly or indi-
rectly, for their athletic services to the alma mater. Pressure is often
applied to professors to see to it that indispensable athletes are not
handicapped because of shortcomings in scholarship. Athletic coaches
are frequently paid more than college deans, and occasionally more
than college presidents. Their lyrical pronouncements are received by
the public with greater attention and respect than the solemn admonish-
ments of deans and presidents.

Another detrimental effect of highly organized athletics is that little
or no attention is given to organized play for the majority of college
students. Instead of organized competitive games for the majority of
.students, we have only the punitive compulsory courses given by athletic
instructors in the gymnasiums, which most students find quite intolerable.
This sacrifice of organized communal play in behalf of quasi-professional
(exertions on the part of a few athletes is a physical and mental loss to
the majority of students.

The income derived from athletics often figures prominently in the
budget of colleges, and discourages serious criticism of the abuses con-
nected with athletic activities. Not only pride and prestige but also
vested economic interests are thus tied up with intercollegiate athletics.
The most comprehensive study yet made of American intercollegiate
athletics was the report of the Carnegie Foundation in 1929, American
College Athletics. The president of the Foundation, Dr. Henry S,
Pritchett, thus summarized some of the more important abuses of the
system:

Intercollegc athletics are highly competitive. Every college or university
longs for a winning team in its group. The coach is on the alert to bring the most
promising athletes in the secondary schools to his college team. A system of
recruiting and subsidizing has grown up, under which boys are offered pecuniary
and other inducements to enter a particular college. The system is demoralizing
and corrupt, alike for the boy who takes the money and for the agent who
arranges it, and for the whole group of college and secondary school boys who
know about it. ...

For many games the strict organization and the tendency to commercialize
the sport have taken the joy out of the game. In football, for example, great
numbers of boys do not play football, as in English schools and colleges, for the
fun of it. A few play intensely. The great body of students are onlookers.7

While the abuses associated with intercollegiate athletics are not yet
so prevalent in secondary education, the trend here is distinctly in the
direction of the college situation. High school football teams stimulate
more gusto on the part of the student body than any form of scholarly
activity or achievements. Some socially prominent preparatory schools
lay even more stress upon their athletic teams than do many of the
lesser colleges. There is little doubt that organized athletics today are

7 Cited in Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. I, p, 377. There have been
some local and sporadic reforms since 1529, but the general picture of intercollegiate
athletics remains much the same.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 763

a serious menace to most forms of truly earnest intellectual endeavor.
In a generation like ours, rocked by a devastating world war, we should
call attention to the disastrous and dangerous aspects of super-patriotic
education.8 No doubt the first World War received its mental prepara-
tion from the highly biased and intensely patriotic instruction in history
and allied subjects which was given in the schools of Europe before 1914.
This situation was carefully studied by Jonathan French Scott in his
important book, Patriots in the Making. The education received by the
generation before 1914 was designed to make the citizens of each state
highly suspicious of the motives and morality of its neighbors. Unfor-
tunately, no lesson was learned from the disastrous effects of this mode of
instruction as demonstrated by the first World War. Rather, the situ-
ation after 1918 became infinitely worse than it was before 1914. Na-
tionalistic bias and super-patriotism are far more rampant in the text-
books of today in Europe than in any earlier period. Professor Scott
demonstrated this in his study of post-war education, The Menace of
Nationalism in Education. His dolorous conclusions were extended and
confirmed by Profevssor Charles E. Merriam, in his Making of Citizens,
which summarized the results of an elaborate series of studies of patriotic
education in the contemporary world. With the growth of Fascism, the
situation became much worse than before 1920. Patriotism has literally
been elevated to the rank of a religion; indeed, it is the major religion of
Fascist countries. Russian Communism is theoretically international in
its outlook," but Stalin's policy of "socialism in a single state," combined
with threats of a Fascist attack, developed an intensely nationalistic and
patriotic tendency in Russian education. The United States has been
far better off in these respects than the European countries, but, as
Bessie L. Pierce and others have amply demonstrated, much remains to
be done in our own country to put our instruction in history and the social
studies on an impartial basis and to provide an objective outlook upon
world affairs. The defense program and the war intensified the national-
istic trend in our own education and textbooks. Reactionaries took ad-
vantage of this situation to start a drive on liberal textbooks, even those
of liberal interventionists like Harold Rugg. The National Association
of Manufacturers started an investigation of school textbooks early in
1941, but it was at least temporarily shamed out of existence by the
adroitness of Professor Clyde R. Miller and others.

Some Aspects of a Rational System of Education

Let us now outline briefly, and necessarily quite incompletely, the
essentials of a rational system of education compatible with the knowl-
edge and needs of our day.9

In the first place, we should make a thorough use of the most reliable

8 See above, pp. 219-221, 330-332.

9 The writer has made no attempt here to include comments on sex education.
He has dealt with this subject in V. F. Calverton and S. D. Schmalhausen, The
New Generation, Macaulay, 1930, pp. 632-672.

764 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

intelligence tests in order to determine the type of education to which the
various elements in the population should logically aspire. The tests
should be concerned not only with such things as vocational guidance, but
also with the degree and type of education that should be provided for
the intellectual groups and levels disclosed as a result of such mental tests.
Those with a low intelligence quotient should never be encouraged to go
ahead with a general education in literature, science, and the arts, but
should at once be put in institutions where they may be effectively in-
structed in the rudiments of their native language, in the elements of
arithmetic and its everyday applications, and in such types of vocational
training as will enable them to learn a particular trade and maintain a
self-sustaining existence in society.

A frank recognition of the fact that a large proportion of the population
can profit only by education of this sort would help to solve our social
problems and reduce the unnecessary burdens and wastes in our educa-
tional system. It is far better to train the mentally retarded children of
America to make a decent living, though they never hear of Browning or
Shakespeare. Our present policy is to burden the schools with a horde
whose vocational training we ignore, in a vain effort to make them appre-
ciate the finest gems of art and literature. Upon the completion of their
"education" they are unfitted for a trade, and, instead of settling down to
Milton of an evening, they confine their literary investigations to the
daily paper or the pulp magazines. They, likewise, devote their artistic
appreciation to an intensive observation of Mickey Mouse* or Donald
Duck in the movies, or of the touching photographs in the movie maga-
zines and the illustrated weeklies and monthlies.

Having sanely provided for this class, which has no real place in the
type of education designed to carry the students through the colleges, we
could deal more effectively with those who are intellectually capable of
attaining to, and profiting by, an education in the arts, sciences, and
higher technology.

Once a rational sorting out of pupils, according to mental capacity and
vocational aptitudes, has been accomplished and the appropriate form
of education prescribed for each type, we shall have advanced far toward
creating a rational educational program.

Elementary and grammar-school instruction would be differentiated
to meet the needs of two main groups: (1) those for whom manual train-
ing and the industrial arts are most relevant, and (2) those for whom a
literary education is justified and who may legitimately aspire to go on
through high school and college.

With respect to the first group, education should be brought more
closely into relationship with everyday life situations and problems.
The formalities and abstractions of education should be reduced to a
minimum. Elementary instruction in the social sciences must surely be
provided, for under a democracy these pupils will ultimately have the
same public responsibilities as the mentally more talented groups. When
we come to the education of the latter, far more attention should be

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 765

given to the social studies, beginning in the very early grades. Here
also should begin the study of the foreign languages, so that we may
put an end to the travesty of finding mature college students wrestling
with the elements of French, Spanish, and German grammar.

A further development of the junior high school will make it possible
to take care of a great deal of the instruction now given in the senior
high school. Most of the formal and disciplinary subjects should be
cleared away during the junior high school course. Rhetoric, elementary
mathematics, and all formal linguistic studies should be mastered by the
student by the time he enters the senior high school. There should also
be plenty of opportunity for further work in the social studies. Certain
junior high schools would, of course, specialize almost entirely in voca-
tional training and the industrial arts, though continuing essential work
in the social studies.

The senior high school should be free from most of the academic rub-
bish which occupies the attention of pupils in this institution today. A
rational use of the pupil's time before the senior high school would easily
make this possible. The whole curriculum of the high school should be
reconstructed to prepare the student for life rather than for entrance
into college later on. The colleges must have students, and they would
readily accept high school graduates who have had a realistic education,
if the high school authorities would only rebel against the tyranny of
the conventional college board examinations. Our senior high school cur-
riculum should be reorganized around four major divisions: natural sci-
ence, industrial arts, the social studies, and aesthetics. The industrial
arts course should be broadened to include essential commercial studies.
Most high school students will not go further in their educational
career. Hence they should be prepared in this institution for a successful
personal and social life. If we wish to keep our high school graduates
out of the crime and vice which unemployment and loafing stimulate, we
must prepare them for some sort of remunerative career before they
graduate. If necessary, the course could be lengthened to five years.
But a rational planning of the pre-high school period in education would
make it possible to work wonders, even with a four-year senior high school
course. Such a plan as we have outlined here would provide the high
school graduate with a better and more advanced education than is pos-
sessed today by the graduate of a junior college. If we keep the junior
college and expand its use, the more advanced character of high school
instruction would permit the introduction of a more mature and useful
type of junior college curriculum.

We may now approach the problem of higher education, about which
there is today a vast amount of controversy and confusion. Most of this
could be eliminated if we were honest enough to differentiate between
institutions which minister primarily to the needs of such students as
merely desire to go to college and those which would meet the needs of
that minority of serious students who look forward to college as a means
of acquiring a real education.

766 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

The greater part of those who go to college today do so because it is the
fashionable thing to do so. This tendency should not be discouraged,
but it should be met in a rational fashion. Institutions for such students
should prepare them for the rough-and-tumble game of life, success in
which, at the present time, rarely depends upon erudition or high intellec-
tual attainments. Indeed, Mr. Carlisle, a prominent, banker, once told
a group of Princeton students that the literary college education was a
handicap in business. In other words, the factory plant in higher educa-
tion should frankly be adapted to the factory type of student.

If this situation were candidly faced, an educational revolution would
be achieved. We would no longer try to educate highly capable and
serious students in such unwieldy institutions. We would make over
the whole curriculum in such a way as to handle the great mass of college
students rationally and efficiently. Many phases of the indictment of
our overgrown universities would disappear. Criticism of overatten-
tion to intercollegiate sports and social diversions would be beside the
point. Such activities might well play as vital a role as does the academic
subject-matter in the training of those who logically should be attending
these factory institutions.

After all, football, motoring, and terpsichorean endeavor have far more
relevance to the after-college life of most students than have calculus and
philology. The ability to adjust a bow-tie to a wing collar is more vital
to the average male than higher differential equations or the theory of
valency. To be able to act as a charming hostess at a sorority party is a
far more useful accomplishment to the average female student than a
mastery of the future periphrastic or the second law of thermodynamics.
Once we honestly face the facts as to the type of guidance that the ma-
jority of college students require, we shall no longer expect the large
universities to meet the needs of the few earnest and highly capable stu-
dents. We shall awaken to the fact that they have a very special adapta-
bility to serving that great army of students who have produced our
educational factories through the sheer pressure of numbers.

In these large institutions for the mediocre and indifferent mass, inter-
collegiate athletics might reach a high stage of development and occupy
a considerable part of the students' time. Thoroughgoing provision
should, however, be made for intramural athletics, with universal par-
ticipation, in order to develop health and teach the psychological and
social lessons of organized play to all. The physical health of students
should be safeguarded in every possible way and candid instruction in
personal hygiene should constitute an important element in the cur-
riculum. Training in the habits of obedience and social responsibility
might well be provided, not only through athletics, but also through other
forms of drill and regimentation, which should not, of course, be too
extensive or distasteful. In handling upper-classmen, student self-gov-
ernment might well be experimented with, so that the graduates will have
had some training in the art of self-control and some conception of the
duties and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 767

A varied and extensive social life would be desirable in such institu-
tions. Etiquette and social intercourse should be stressed so that the
graduates may be turned out as polished ladies and gentlemen in the
conventional sense of the term, or at least with reasonably passable man-
ners. Attention should also be paid to the cultivation of a not too
abstruse type of aesthetic interests. In this way, the students in such
institutions could be helped to realize how to dispose of their leisure
time in a civilized manner in later life.

The academic requirements in institutions of this sort would naturally
be reduced to a minimum, perhaps lower than that of the "pass students"
in the English colleges. Instruction should be directly designed to equip
the student with a general knowledge of the world in which he is living,
the whole purpose being to provide at least a veneer of understanding and
culture, in the popular sense of this term. The graduate should be able
to leave college a facile and intelligent conversationalist. The method
and procedure followed in the recent so-called "outlines" of history, sci-
ence, technology, literature, and art would seem to be excellently de-
signed for the purpose of such institutions. No attempt should be made
to secure intensive education in any special field, but equal care should
be taken to guard against abysmal ignorance with respect to any major
phase of modern knowledge.

The courses here would be "orientation" courses exclusively and par
excellence. We would thus avoid the all too frequent results of the con-
ventional university career of today, namely, the situation where the
average college graduate has never heard of Willard Gibbs, Richard
Wagner, or Rodin, where even the capable student may have heard of
Helmholtz but imagines that Brahms was a Bohemian chemist and
Pavlov a Russian ballet dancer, or where another equally able youth
can be a master of Liszt but hold that Pasteur was a distinguished Rus-
sian historian.

Along with this initiation into the culture of the human past and pres-
ent, a leading aim of instruction in these large institutions should be the
cultivation of intellectual urbanity and amiable open-mindedness. The
chief mechanisms of human behavior should be presented and the stupidity
of unthinking conservatism and dogmatic bigotry relentlessly exposed.

The instruction should, for the most part, be given by highly capable
and entertaining lecturers, meeting very large groups, in order to reduce
the burden of teaching to a minimum and to exploit to the maximum
marked ability to provide both classroom entertainment and enlighten-
ment. So far as possible, surpassingly capable lecturers, of varied
talents, such as William Lyon Phelps, Edward A. Ross, George E. Vin-
cent, Harry Gideonse, Lothrop Stoddard, Norman Thomas, Will Durant,
John Erskine, Harry Overstreet, Gene Tunney, and Carlton Hayes, should
be sought for such positions, even though not enough with the talent of
the above named could be secured. The lecturers might be aided to
a certain extent by tutors, who would act as special guides to that
minority of students who might desire something beyond the minimum

768 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

of requirements. Few examinations would need to be given but at-
tendance at all class exercises should be compulsory. Every effort would
be made to make the instruction and college life highly interesting.

The professors in such institutions, aside from the few competent and
facile lecturers who would be required for the practical instruction, might
well be research professors whose scientific activities would be supported
in princely fashion by the tuition which might legitimately be required
of students in this class of institutions. We would realize in this way an
almost ideal situation, namely, one in which an institution made up of
students who do not desire to be taught will be manned in part by pro-
fessors who prefer not to teach.

Some might ask why we insist upon having these research professors
engaged in their investigations on the campuses of the institutions which
are not devoted to rigorous intellectual endeavor. Why not take a part
of the revenue derived from these institutions to support great scientific
laboratories, entirely apart from these enterprises that are designed
merely to promote self-control, a veneer of cultural appreciation, and
intellectual urbanity among the hordes of mediocre and indifferent col-
legians of today?

The writer by no means presses this point, but it would seem to him
that it has a special advantage. To have accessible on the campus build-
ings which would house alert and active scientists, experimental tech-
nologists, productive investigators in the social sciences, and creative
artists in various lines, and could exhibit the products of their work, would
be of a high potential educational significance. They might have in
each institution somewhat the same function that the Museum of Natural
History, the New York Public Library, the New School for Social Re-
search and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have in New York City.
Students might, from time to time, be taken on excursions into these
buildings and come to have a first-hand consciousness of the exist-
ence of such centers of human activity and begin to realize what scientific
experimentation, productive scholarship, and creative artistic endeavor
actually mean.

It will, of course, go without saying that, in case certain students who
originally enrolled without any deep interest in education become stirred
to intellectual endeavor during their period of residence, provision should
be made for transferring them to the institutions for serious higher educa-
tion which are shortly to be described. As to the time essential for the
completion of the work in these "civilizing institutions," it may probably
be maintained that two, or at most, three years would be wholly adequate.
In this way the problems of both a realistic junior college and of factory
education would be rationally solved by a single set of institutions.

The years saved from the four-year course of today could then be used
for specialized training in schools of engineering, business administration,
domestic science, applied arts, and the like. As a result, after four years,
these young people would not only be civilized but prepared for work and
marriage. At the present time, the college graduate is rarely a polished

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 769

person or one prepared to take up either professional or conjugal responsi-
bility.

To many such a scheme as this outlined above may suggest that the
author has not been duly serious and sets forth the proposition in a quasi-
humorous vein, but he may assure his readers that such is not the case
and that the proposal is meant very literally and offered in all serious-
ness.10 He would further challenge anyone to demonstrate that such a
system would not produce better preparation for the general run of situa-
tions encountered by the majority of our present-day college graduates
than does the college of today. It implies a recognition, at the outset, of
what the average college man and woman is going to do and be in
life, and a firm resolution to train them for such a status if nothing
more. If we adhered to the program outlined above, the factory system
in education could be made to do well in the one function which it can
actually execute with any efficiency or propriety. Colleges would cease
to be the failure that they are today with respect to either civilizing or
educating their students.11 College graduates might then at least be
urbane and cultivated ladies and gentlemen, even if they were not
scholars.

It is frequently objected that these great civilizing institutions would
be regarded with suspicion or contempt and that it would be considered
a disgrace to attend them. Such is not tlie case. They would be the
Yales and Princetons of the future, socially more respectable and more
eagerly sought after than the truly educational colleges to be described
below. Though they might actually be civilizing mills, they would not be
formally so designated. Rather, they would be christened in a properly
impressive manner and would carry appropriate social prestige. They
would, of course, be open to both the well-to-do and the poor, as are our
great private and state universities of today.

Turning to the second set of institutions — small colleges designed for
that minority of students who really want an education — we should pro-
vide a quite different curriculum and intellectual atmosphere.

In the first place, such institutions should be manned exclusively by
professors who desire to teach and promote learning and are able to do so,
their tenure and promotion depending upon their capacity to provide
substantial instruction and effective intellectual stimulation. We would
thus eliminate from such institutions: (1) those who try to teach because
they know of nothing else which they can or want to do, and (2) those
who regard affiliation with the teaching profession as the easiest method
whereby they can face the landlord, the grocer, and the tailor with assur-
ance and complacency. The class of professors who enter education
chiefly for the purpose of writing and research would, as we have already

10 Since the author first set forth this suggestion in Current History some years
back, a similar plan has been recommended by Dean Charles M. McConn of Lehigh
and New York Universities, and Professor David Snedden of Columbia University.

11 For devastating material on the futility of the present liberal college education,
see Harvey Smith, The Gang's All Here, Princeton University Press, 1941; and
J. R. Tunis, Was College Worth While? Harcourt, Brace, 1936.

770 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

seen, be taken care of by the rich and numerous institutions supported by
the attendance of those who merely go to college.

Professors in the second class of institutions would be allowed to write
or carry on research, but should not be compelled to do so on a large scale
to maintain their status and tenure. Their rank and reward should de-
pend upon their ability to teach and to impart intellectual enthusiasm.
Men like William Graham Sumner, Albion W. Small, Frederick Jackson
Turner, Herbert Joseph Davenport, George Lincoln Burr, Ferdinand
Schevill, James Harvey Robinson, Charles H. Haskins, Charles Austin
Beard, Alexander Meiklejohn, Morris Cohen, Max Otto, Benjamin
Kendrick, and others, would immediately come to mind as the sort of
teachers desirable in institutions of this type. If it is asked where we
are to find such teachers, it may be answered that there are plenty of
them available but, as Professor Ise points out later on, it is hard for
them to get a post in a college or university today.

Besides stimulating lecturers and leaders of discussion, the tutorial
system should be used to guide intellectual enthusiasm in a scientific
manner — but not as a special means of policing and bulldozing reluctant
youths whose thoughts gravitate more towards the saxophone or the goal
posts than towards Einstein or John Dewey. Provision should be made
through scholarships and fellowships for students of superior intelligence
and intellectual earnestness who are unable to enjoy a college education
at their own expense. In case any students start out with serious inten-
tions, but later decide that they would rather become civilized extraverts
in one of the mass-production colleges, they could readily be transferred
to such an institution of their choice.

Recognizing that these institutions for the minority who desire an edu-
cation represent the only place in which it is worth while to work out a
complete curriculum for an exacting scheme of higher education, we may
now briefly summarize what appears to the present writer to be the essen-
tials of such a program.

In the first place, there should be adequate provision in the pre-college
years for a complete mastery of that indispensable tool of all learning:
namely, language. A college student should be at least tolerably ac-
quainted with the language of his own country, and thoroughly able to
read at least two other important modern languages. If our present
elementary, grammar, and high schools were cleared of the debris of
relatively worthless subject-matter, there would be no difficulty what-
ever in making every prospective college student a master of the linguistic
machinery of learning before he sets foot in college. This would mean
that language courses would practically disappear from institutions of
higher learning, except for those highly specialized courses providing
instruction in the ancient or oriental languages, indispensable for cer-
tain types of research in ancient culture and for economic and com-
mercial enterprise in oversea areas today.

The first or basic stage of a rational curriculum would be devoted to
informing the students with respect to the nature of the material world,
from the cosmos to the atom, by the most direct and efficient method

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 771

conceivable. No student would be graduated who was not reasonably
conversant with the outstanding discoveries of modern science with re-
spect to the material universe in which we are situated.

Next, we should insist upon the acquisition of a thorough knowledge
of the nature and requirements of man as the highest form of animal life
on the planet and as a member of social groups. This would entail a rea-
sonable mastery of the outstanding contributions of anthropogeography,
comparative biology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, and soci-
ology.

Having acquired a knowledge of the world and of man, one would
pass on to instruction as to how to exploit the material world so as to
promote the happiness and prosperity of mankind. This would require,
at the outset, a thorough acquaintance with the contributions of modern
technology. In other words, no man can be regarded as educated who is
not informed with respect to the status of material culture and the devel-
opments through which it has passed to attain its present level. Then,
the social sciences should be cultivated, in order that students may learn
how our institutional life might be brought up to something like the same
order of achievement which has been reached in technology and science.
The outstanding problem of contemporary civilization is to bring our in-
stitutional life into closer harmony with the requirements of our existing
material culture. Unless we are successful in so doing, there is little
probability that humanity will succeed in coping with the complexities
produced by modern mechanical civilization. If this be the case, then
more emphasis should be laid upon the social sciences than upon any
other aspect of contemporary education.

Next in importance to learning the nature of man and the procedure
involved in the exploitation of the material world through the cooperation
of technology and social science, is comprehensive instruction in the field
of aesthetics. After all, a civilization rendered prosperous through a
remarkable technology and efficient social institutions would, neverthe-
less, to use Plato's phrase, remain essentially "a city of pigs." Therefore,
greater attention should be given to the aesthetic aspects of human en-
lightenment, thus creating a "supra-pig" culture.12 And in this depart-
ment of aesthetics should be placed not merely plastic and chromatic art
and music, but also literature, which is usually associated with punitive
linguistic studies and philology. This generalized curriculum in no way
precludes specialization. Indeed, it is the best basis for later specializa-
tion. Leaders in the professional groups would naturally be recruited
from graduates of these institutions of learning who had been trained in
rigorous professional schools after graduation.

While regarding Dean Alexander Meikle John's now lamentably aban-
doned experimental college at the University of Wisconsin as far more
promising than the conventional institution, yet we hold that the sequence
outlined above is more rational and comprehensive than his proposal to

12 See below, pp. 795-797, 827 ff.

772 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

devote the first two years to a study of Hellenic civilization and of the
Industrial Revolution and its effects, and then to pass the students along
to complete their upper-class years in the conventional curriculum.

As the dominating psychology of these institutions of learning, we
should recognize that an active interest on the part of the student is the-
key to any degree of success in educational enterprise. Everything pos-
sible should be done to make the educational process a spontaneous and
pleasant affair, entered into with enthusiasm by both student and teacher.
Inasmuch as students in these educational institutions would be there
primarily for the purpose of learning, it would not be necessary to goad
them to perfunctory and sporadic cerebral activity by periodic examina-
tions. General examinations at the end of courses and a comprehensive
final examination at the end of the four years of college would be ader
quate. In this way the examination bogey, a nuisance and an irritation
to the real teacher and the good student alike, would be reduced, while
retaining whatever good features it may possess. The plan introduced
at the University of Chicago by President Robert M. Hutchins has been
the most notable achievement along this line. Here the specific residence
requirement for granting a bachelor's degree has been replaced by a
comprehensive general examination. At any time during his college
career a student may apply for admission to the examination. If he
satisfactorily passes the examination, he is awarded his degree. This
new program, besides doing away with the conventional examination
bogey, repudiates the custodial function for institutions of higher learn-
ing.124

Education and Social Change

If we hope to bridge the alarming gulf between our institutions and
our thinking, we must prepare to face the necessity of very extensive so-
cial change. Our ideas and institutions must be brought up to some-
thing like the same level of intelligence and efficiency that we have
already attained in the scientific and mechanical realms.

There are two possible methods of social change. One is orderly and
gradual change. The other is that violent change which we call revolu-
tion, based upon exasperation and desperation, motivated by hatred and
oppression, and all too often guided by deep emotions rather than by in-
formed intelligence.18 So far, it must be admitted, the powers in control

12a This admirable administrative reform introduced by President Hutchins should
not be confused with his reactionary and quasimedieval educational philosophy.
President Hutchins is a paradoxical case. He is a stalwart social, economic, and
political progressive, and one of the most courageous defenders of academic free-
dom. Moreover, he is a radical in administrative reforms in education. On the
other hand, under the influence of Mortimer Adler, Scott Buchanan, and others, he
has evolved a philosophy of education which comes dangerously near to medieval
Scholasticism. On this see the articles by John Dewey in The Social Frontier,
January and March, 1937.

18 See A. E. Osborne, An Alternative for War and Revolution, Educational
Screen, Inc., 1939.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 773

of society have never surrendered to change without either violence or
collapse. In some cases, as in the western Roman Empire, they have
held on until the bottom of the system dropped right out from under
them. In others, like the French Revolution, they have resisted change
until the revolutionary mob unseated and destroyed them. Some claim
that, in England and the United States, we have witnessed the change
from one social system to another by gradual and peaceful methods. But
this is not historically true. In both countries the social system under
which the people now live was based on revolution — the revolutions of
1645-1669 and 168S-1689 in England, and that of 1775-1783 in the
United States. The present capitalistic and nationalistic social system
has been supplanted in but one place — Russia — and that change was
effected by revolution. Even the less sweeping changes in Italy and
Germany were accomplished by violence and war. Hence the verdict of
history would seem to indicate that we are altogether too likely to have
to depend upon revolution for social change of an important and far-
reaching character. The opposition of the vested interests to the mild
reform measures of President Roosevelt would seem to add further con-
firmation to this thesis.

However, an able and wise social philosopher, Lester F. Ward, was
wont to emphasize that social development in the past had to be spon-
taneous, and, all too often, violent, because we had no definite conception
of progress and no body of information adequate to guide social change in
competent fashion. The situation has now changed. We have wide
knowledge of the advances of mankind in the past. The social sciences
provide a body of new and cogent information, the chief justification and
relevance of which lie in its service to the scientific ordering of social
change. We may bring about social change in an orderly and beneficial
manner today, if we can only secure popular support for such a program.
The chief obstacle lies in the fact that organized education has, thus far,
tended to inculcate information and attitudes which resist social change
and has accorded too little attention and respect to the social sciences.

We can hope to modernize our social ideas and institutions only by an
extension and improvement of the social studies. The responsibility of
education to society should boil down to three major phases of educa-
tional activity: (1) a discriminating conservation of the social heritage;
(2) fearless social criticism; and (3) resolute and informed social plan-
ning.

It is as important as ever that education should transmit the heritage
of the past. Without this knowledge, especially the knowledge required
to operate our present technology and social system, man would be help-
less. But there is no longer any reason why we should uncritically accept
the total social heritage. Our past tendency to do this has created the
social crisis of our day. We must sift the social heritage through in-
formed analytical examination. We must eliminate from it those ob-
structive antiques which are obviously the product of past ignorance,
superstition, and dogma.

774 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

In sifting the social heritage and in the creation of a mental attitude
favorable to this process, historical studies can make the most potent
contribution. The possible service of historical insight to social better-
ment was clearly shown by James Harvey Robinson. His work, in this
respect, may be regarded as one of the outstanding contributions of the
twentieth century to constructive educational doctrine. Certainly, noth-
ing is more urgently needed than the capacity to face the past with dis-
criminating appreciation, free alike from both reverence and cynical in-
difference. No other study, save history, assumes any direct responsi-
bility for bringing about such a state of mind. This creation of an
intelligent attitude toward the past is indispensable as the preparation
for the second major function of education, viewed as an instrument of
social progress, namely, an appraisal of the existing social order. We
cannot approach the present structure of society with any degree of
objectivity unless we can view its origins with tolerant understanding.
Likewise, we cannot be interested in working for a better social future
until we arc clearly aware of the weaknesses and inadequacies of the
social order in which we live.

After history has provided a discriminating appraisal of the past, the
other social studies must supply us with the means of critically assessing
the social structures of our own time. First they must describe, realisti-
cally and completely, every aspect of the society in which we move. If
this job is well done, the critical function of the social studies will emerge
naturally and inevitably. Any competent description of, say, our social,
economic, and political institutions, will inevitably reveal their weak-
nesses and failures, as well as their strength and successes. Social criti-
cism is, obviously, not the sole task or responsibility of the social studies,
but it is certainly an indispensable phase of their contribution to the edu-
cational process. Until we possess a complete understanding of the exist-
ing social order we cannot have any precise conception of what is actu-
ally required to bring about a better day.

An immediate responsibility of education to society, right now, is,
moreover, the preparation of a blueprint of a better social system and a
.realistic indication of how we may bring this into existence in a gradual,
peaceful, and intelligent fashion. We have already made it clear that
human society is rapidly approaching the point where Utopia and chaos
are the only alternatives. The guidance of society by realistic education
appears to many to be the only guarantee that we could attain utopia.
Certainly, it provides the only reasonable hope that this move can be
made without violence and destruction. Education has a very definite
self-interest in this matter. Unless we avoid economic collapse, social
chaos, and dictatorship, organized education cannot be maintained in a
state of dignity, independence, and social prestige. Education must save
democratic civilization if it is to save itself.

We have already suggested that the functions of realistic education in
the social sciences should be a highly selective conservation of the social
heritage, a fair but resolute criticism of the social order, the formulation

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 775

of a program for the improvement of society, and an outline of peace-
ful and intelligent methods of executing this program. Let us see how
.well education is measuring up to these major social responsibilities.

Viewed in any broad way, we must honestly admit that education
blindly conserves the heritage from the past, without any important pre-
tense to critical selection, save in fields of science and technology. With
respect to our basic institutions and beliefs, our educational system con-
serves the past almost as completely and religiously as did the primitive
council of elders and the tribal medicine men. Any resolute attempt to
reject or discard fundamental but antiquated items in our cultural
heritage would immediately place in jeopardy any educational system or
any body of educators. Indeed, the very proposal to do such would be
regarded as rank heresy and fit subject for investigation by the Dies
Committee. Even our most daring educational reforms are, essentially,
only superficial suggestions for improving the structure and administra-
tion of our educational machinery.

There is also amazingly little criticism of our social order, though such
criticism is absolutely indispensable, if we are to discover those weak-
nesses which threaten the very existence of free and orderly society and
if we are to recognize the alterations which are essential to preserve civi-
lization. We live in an age which has given unprecedented lip-service to
the necessity and saving virtues of social research and organized investi-
gation. We contend that "facts will talk," and we propose to let only
facts talk. Tens of millions of dollars have been freely spent in order to
investigate every conceivable type of secondary social problem. Yet,
instead of actually letting the facts talk, our investigators have seen to it
that disagreeable and challenging facts "pipe down." Such facts as are
played up are all too often the conventional, the self-evident, and the
platitudinous, so that much social research has been no more than expen-
sive and pompous documentation of the obvious.

Many of these investigations have been supported by funds derived
from sources which could not tolerate the clear formulation of the mo-
mentous conclusions naturally flowing therefrom. Most of our social
research, therefore, has not only been timid in drawing deductions, but
has been devoted chiefly to looking into trivialities and details. It has
rarely made any pretense to investigating the adequacy of our basic insti-
tutions. Education has thus failed as signally in its critical analysis of
our social order as it has in a discriminating appraisal of the cultural
heritage from the past.

The function of social criticism has been allowed to go by default to
government investigators, journalists, and free-lance economists and
publicists. One has only to mention such characteristic names as Stuart
Chase, Gardiner Means, Abraham Epstein, Charles Austin Beard, Her-
bert Agar, Lewis Mumford, David Cushman Coyle, Ferdinand Lundberg,
George Seldes, Ernest Sutherland Bates, John Chamberlain, John T.
Flynn, and Alfred Bingham to realize the extent to which realistic criti-
cism is carried on outside academic circles. Not so long ago, it was the

776 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

writer's privilege to give a series of lectures before graduate students of
education in one of our foremost schools of education. He was surprised
to find that the students were actually thrilled and excited over informa-
tion that would have been a commonplace in their junior high school
period if education were fulfilling its function in social criticism.

It follows that education, having failed in the function of social criti-
cism, has been deficient in planning for a more efficient social order. As
a matter of fact, realistic observers must admit that formal education has
proved one of the greatest obstacles in the path of social reform. By
tending to breed reverence for the present social order, it distinctly and
deliberately loads the dice in behalf of cultural tradition and social stag-
nation. It stimulates a spirit of social intolerance rather than an at-
titude of courageous experimentation. It tends to discourage even the
minimum reforms necessary to preserve a democratic civilization.

We have made it clear that science and technology are widening and
deepening the already menacing gulf between machines and institutions.
Yet the prevailing attitude of most scientists and engineers is one of social
quietism. Our scientists tell us that science may create unprecedented
material advances and social maladjustments, but that it cannot furnish
any immediate, direct, and authoritative guidance as to how to meet
these problems with expert intelligence. This is the message of an able
president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
himself one of the outstanding American social scientists.14 The scientists
are quite willing to assume the responsibility for "advancing science," but
they hang back when it comes to "advancing society." They ignore or
evade the obvious fact that, unless our social institutions overtake scien-
tific and technical achievements, all will go down together in a common
ruin before many generations have passed. Certainly, if science can-
not lead the social procession nothing can. For those who wish to follow
out this line of thought I would commend the challenging book of Robert
S. Lynd, entitled Knowledge for Whatf™ a much needed and resolute
arraignment of the quietism and evasive philosophy of our intellectual
leaders in the social studies movement.

Organized education not only fails to execute its indispensable function
of social guidance; its leaders usually assume an attitude of hostility to-
ward the few educators who realize their social responsibility and make
even a faint-hearted effort to do their duty.

When we examine the content of the teachings of the so-called subver-
sive educators, we find little cause for any alarm. Our educational
sociologists have stolen no thunder from Stalin, nor even from Norman
Thomas. At the best, they are only giving what Lester F. Ward said
more candidly and far more thoroughly over fifty years ago. Even
John Dewey, rightly regarded as our most stimulating and progressive
educational theorist, rarely presumed to get explicit in the matter of

« W. C. Mitchell, "Science and the State of Mind," in Science, January 6,
i5 Princeton University Press, 1939.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 777

social guidance until he left the profession of education for that of active
political agitation. When Dewey entered the political arena he gave us
something that* we can actually bite into. But not one out of ten of
Dewey's ardent pedagogical disciples has the slightest familiarity with
Dewey's doctrines, which he expressed as a leader of the League for
Progressive Political Action and the People's Lobby.

To sum up, we may say that American educators face two very dis-
tinct alternatives. They can arouse themselves to the social responsi-
bility of education, teach realistically and courageously those things
which are essential to the preservation of democratic civilization, and
organize themselves with sufficient coherence to make sure of their tenure
while thus engaged. They may not succeed, if they literally shoulder the
current social responsibilities of education, but at least they can go down
fighting, having the satisfaction of knowing that they "kept the faith and
fought a good fight."

If our educators refuse to take up the fight for gradual reform while
there is yet time, it is almost inevitable that some form of regimentation,
roughly similar to European Fascism, will settle down upon us. Then the
condition of American educators will be unhappy indeed. Many will
lose their positions, for, under Fascism, education is a much more simple
affair than under democracy. No such extensive and diversified per-
sonnel is required. Those who remain employed will be parrots in the
classroom, and professionally a cross between "kicked dogs and scared
rabbits." And this condition is not far off. The writer was personally
very familiar with Germany and the Germans in the mid- 'twenties.
Adolf Hitler was more inconspicuous at the time than our second-rate
champions of Fascism. He was literally an unknown, when compared
with our proto-Fascists.

In a forthright article in The Social Frontier, Professor John Ise raises
the question of what the teachers, especially the college professors, are
going to do about it all. Are they doing much to promote the fortunes
of the " American Way"? He doubts if they are and does not see any
immediate prospect that they will be, for some time to come. He under-
stands that, for all practical purposes, it is the teachers of the social sci-
ences upon whom will fall the brunt of the burden involved in putting
education behind the movement for social progress. But it is nearly im-
possible today to get courageous and progressive minds into social-science
professorships and to keep them there long enough to accomplish anything
of moment. Educational authorities wish to play safe. They want to
prevent annoyances, even if civilization breaks down in a decade. Pro-
fessor Ise goes to the heart of the matter in the following words :

Most colleges and universities are not supremely interested in securing really
able men. They want personality, dress, teaching ability — which may mean
mediocrity to avoid shooting over the students' heads. They also want safe and
sane economic views; and not infrequently last of all — intellectual power.

There are hundreds of amiable young men teaching in our colleges whose judg-
ment on critical problems is of little value, while really brilliant men of less

778 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

attractive personality, or of radical views, warm their toes in the graduate offices,
hoping for jobs.

Particularly in insisting on conservative views, colleges narrow their chances of
securing able men, for a rather large proportion of the brilliant minds in any
academic society are liberals or radicals.1511

Adult Education

In the period since the first World War special interest has developed
in adult education. This has been due, in the first place, to the fact that
only recently has more than a very small percentage of the population
been able to take advantage of senior high school and college education.
But many of those who were denied this privilege, having since gained
the necessary resources and leisure, seek instruction in institutions de-
signed to deal with adults. In the second place, so rapidly has the
character of information changed that even those who have had a college
education may find their information out of date. Therefore, they seek
to supplement their previous educational experience through adult edu-
cation. Finally, the social crisis has become so immediate that adult
education seems to many to be the only possible way in which education
can be made to serve as our chief instrument of social change. The con-
ventional education in the schools and colleges is, as we have seen, not
very well adapted to serving the cause of social change. Even if it were,
we should probably have to take some decisive form of action in the social
crisis before those now in school and college can grow up and assume a
very prominent part in determining public policy. Only by bringing
realistic and cogent education before adults can we hope to put education
at the service of social change and bring about the latter in an intelligent
and peaceful manner. There are other justifiable reasons for interest in
adult education, but the three just mentioned are the outstanding ones.

There are various types of adult educational enterprises. First, one
may mention the well-known continuation schools, in which young per-
sons, particularly those working during the daytime, carry forward their
educational experience. This type of education has been primarily
vocational, though more attention has of late been given to cultural
subjects. Closely associated with continuation courses are those devoted
primarily to remedying the deficiencies of a person's education in earlier
life, and to bringing his information thoroughly up to date.

A prominent and important form of adult education is what has been
called functional group education. The first conspicuous development of
functional group education (folk schools) was introduced among farmers
in Denmark after the war of 1862. The social and economic crisis in
Danish farming life impelled the farmers to get together and study their
economic and public problems. As a result, an effective reconstruction
of Danish agriculture and rural culture was brought about. The success
of these folk schools encouraged similar developments in other areas in
the decades following.

"Shackles on Professors," in Social Frontier, May, 1937, p. 243.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 779

Until the second World War, folk Schools, first associated with the
growth of the cooperative movement in Denmark proved the most popu-
lar type of adult education in all the Scandinavian countries and in
Germany. These schools usually were resident institutions patronized
by young men and women. Their main purpose was to familiarize the
students with historical and cultural subjects and to give them a proper
orientation with respect to social, economic, and other current problems.
They were devoted solely to the purpose of learning, had no entrance
examinations, and conferred no degrees.

Workers' education has been the other outstanding example of func-
tional group education. More than a century ago, Robert Owen in
England and Thomas Skidmore in the United States urged the education
of the masses. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels did their best to promote the education of workers. The
English Fabian Society, headed by leading English intellectuals, was
especially sympathetic towards labor education. University extension
facilities have been provided for workers by institutions of higher learn-
ing which have taken a kindly attitude towards labor education. This has
been particularly true in England. Labor colleges have been established.
Among the most notable are Ruskin College, Oxford, established in 1899
by English and American radicals, and Brookwood Labor College at
Katonah, N. Y., founded through the collaboration of academic radicals
and American trade-unions. In Germany, after the first World War, a
number of important labor schools were set up, the most famous being
the Berlin Trade Union School, opened in 1919, and the Academy of
Labor at Frankfort, established in 1920. The Rand School of Social
Science, opened in New York City in 1906 to promote socialistic educa-
tion, has had an important influence in vitalizing the labor movement
in the United States.

Interest in adult education in the United States was promoted by the
Carnegie Corporation, which appointed an advisory committee on adult
education and conducted several notable surveys of the needs and
facilities. A national conference on adult education was held in Cleve-
land under its auspices in 1925, and the American Association for Adult
Education was then created. The American Association for Adult
Education maintains its headquarters in New York City and is a general
clearing house and coordinator for all adult educational activities in the
United States. The outstanding institutions for adult education in the
United States are the New School for Social Research, founded in New
York City in 1919 by James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard,
Thorstein Veblen, and other progressive scholars, and the People's Insti-
tute of Cooper Union in New York City, long directed by Everett Dean
Martin.

The adult education movement long suffered a handicap from the popu-
lar conviction that it is difficult for older people to learn. Edward L.
Thorndike, however, in his work on Adult Learning, published in 1928,
showed that the curve of learning ability reaches its height at about 25

780 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

and then slowly drops until, at the age of 45, one's ability to learn is about
exactly what it was at the age of 18. But the difference between the
ability to learn at the ages of 25 and 45 is so slight that it offers no logical
obstacle to enthusiasm for adult education. The conclusion is that adults
under 50 can readily learn anything which they really want to learn.
Moreover, the ability to learn does not cease until the individual reaches
a period of senile dementia. There are, then, no important psychological
reasons why adult education cannot succeed.

There have been numerous statements of late by eminent social scien-
tists and educators to the effect that the social crisis is so imminent that
adult education is absolutely indispensable, if we are to have intelligent
direction of social change. But there has been little concentrated effort
to act on the basis of such a conviction. The only notable venture has
been that conducted by Dr. John W. Studebakcr, United States Com-
missioner of Education. He began his work while superintendent of
schools of Des Moines, Iowa, by conducting a nationally famous ex-
perimental discussion forum. This enterprise demonstrated its success
and practicability. Dr. Studebaker carried over his enthusiasm and
program as Commissioner of Education, to which office he was appointed
in 1934. Making use of a federal grant, he established a number of
Public Forum Demonstration Centers in selected states throughout the
country.16 He engaged as lecturers distinguished and capable scholars
and publicists, and thus stirred up a great deal of intelligent interest in
public problems. Dr. Studebaker has been motivated primarily by the
notion that forums constitute an indispensable type of training, if we
are to salvage democracy and avoid Fascism in the United States. The
major results which he hopes to achieve through these forums have
been summarized as follows:

Citizens will be able to view our problems from a national rather than a sec-
tional point of view.

They will be trained in the essential equipment of democracy, the ability to
discuss problems intelligently in public.

These 'forums will promote tolerance and balance and will enable participants
to safeguard themselves against the "rabble-rouser."

' Public meetings in America will be enabled to take on a more intelligent
atmosphere.

Demagogues may be more effectively checked and held up to just ridicule.

A new enthusiasm and interest in public affairs may be engendered.

It is to be hoped that this program of adult education will be greatly
extended and loyally supported. The Fascist propaganda is extremely
powerful and persistent. The only hope of maintaining democracy is
to educate the citizens of a democracy as to the problems and responsi-
bilities involved in democratic government. The school system does this
very imperfectly today and, as we have seen, we shall probably have to
rely for guidance and direction in the social crisis upon those who have
already passed through the school period. It is literally true that the

16 See J. W. Studebaker, Plain Talk, National Home Library Foundation, 1936.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 781

destinies of democracy are largely tied up with the success of adult
education in democratic countries, but most of this work has been sus-
pended or curtailed in wartime.

The Raids on Education

It is obvious that economic depressions and other serious breakdowns
in our social and economic order are proof of inadequacies in the educa-
tional system. Today, we have efficient technology and abundant
natural resources to produce all the food and goods which are needed for
a high standard of living. The fact that we have starvation, misery, a
great relief problem, and a second World War is obviously the result of
erroneous ideas. Only through education can these be supplanted by
accurate and up-to-date ideas. Therefore, greater expenditures for
education and the encouragement of more realistic and courageous teach-
ing are called for. But the educational budget was cut ruthlessly after
the depression of 1929 set in, and there has been a vigorous drive against
the intellectual independence of teachers almost without parallel in our
educational history.

The financial raid upon American education since 1929 is especially
serious, for financial support of education was inadequate even in pros-
perous days. Reasonable educators have estimated that a completely
adequate scheme of public education in the United States would require
an annual budget of over 10 billion dollars — certainly not an unreasonable
expenditure if we received from education the social contributions which
we might legitimately expect. Yet even in our most prosperous years
the appropriation made for public education has never reached more than
one fourth of this figure. The total expenditures for public education
in 1930 were $2,605,699,000, the all-time high to date. Hence we need
not be surprised at the report of the United States Office of Education
showing that, even in the prosperous days of 1929, there were over 2
million children of school age who were not in school at all. Ten per
cent of our children did not reach the sixth grade; over 14 per cent did
not reach the seventh grade; over 25 per cent did not reach the eighth
grade ; 45 per cent did not reach high school ; and 90 per cent did not have
the opportunity to attend college. These facts are certainly not in
harmony with the ordinary assumptions of adequate free public instruc-
tion in a democratic society. Moreover, from the same source we learn
that approximately one fifth of all school children were suffering from
starvation, malnutrition, and inadequate medical care. Only when we
understand this situation with respect to education in prosperous days
can we comprehend the serious implications of the contraction of financial
support of education since the depression fell upon us.

Total expenditures for public education fell from $2,605,699,000 in
1930 to $1,940,133,000 in 1934. Farming communities became so im-
poverished that they literally found it almost impossible to provide
adequate support for their schools. The income of the farming popula-
tion declined from about 17 billion dollars in 1920 to $5,200,000,000 in

782 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

1932. Even in 1929, the average per capita income of the farmers was
only $273, as against $908 for the rest of the population. The federal
government, in spite of generous expenditures for relief elsewhere, has
failed to come to the rescue of public education in any serious manner,
save for land-grant colleges and vocational education.

In American cities there was an average falling off of 80 per cent in
expenditures for school buildings between 1931 and 1934. When we
reflect that American school children were not adequately housed in
1929, we need not be surprised at the scandalous overcrowding which
exists today. Almost a million and a half American children occupy
school buildings which have been condemned as unsafe or unsanitary.
Many schools have been closed altogether. The serious situation was
remedied only slightly by the aid to school construction given by the
federal government through the Public Works Administration and the
Works Progress Administration. Speaking in 1941 in behalf of the
Federal school nid bill, which would appropriate 300 million dollars for
educational assistance, Federal Security Administrator Paul McNutt and
Dr. Howard A. Dawson of the National Education Association pointed
out that some 265,000 American school children were without any school
facilities.

Between 1930-31 and 1934-35 the median salary of teachers in our
largest cities dropped at least 10 per cent, and in small cities (under
30,000) the median decreased 20 per cent. In many individual cities the
situation was far worse. In Toledo, Ohio, for example, the cuts amounted
to 55 per cent. In 1929-30 the average salary of all teachers (including
superintendents) was $1,420, while in 1934 it had dropped to $1,227. One
third of all employed teachers are getting less than $750 a year. Some
84,000 rural teachers get less than $450 a year. On top of this, there
have been frequent demands that teachers turn back at least part of their
salaries as compulsory donations, while in some cities teachers went
entirely unpaid for long periods after 1931.

Nevertheless, the decrease in teacher reward in the form of salaries was
accompanied by an actual increase in work required of teachers. There
was a great deal of doubling up and an increase in the teaching hours re-
quired. All this meant that the educational cost per pupil (elementary
and secondary) dropped from $86.70 in 1929-30 to $67.48 in 1933-34.

The false policies of economy practiced between 1929 and 1934 touched
such vital spots as textbooks. In spite of the fact that textbooks account
for only about 3 per cent of total educational costs, the expenditures for
textbooks fell off about 30 per cent. Archaic books were retained, as
well as newer books which were falling to pieces through excessive use.
In some cases, books abandoned a generation ago were taken out of
storage and returned to use in the schools because they were in better
physical condition than the books which had replaced them. A particu-
larly deplorable aspect of such enforced educational economy is thai
recent innovations, such as experimental schools, clinics, and new de-
velopments in the social studies, are sacrificed first of all. This happens,,

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 783

in spite of the fact that these innovations represent the most important
additions to educational theory and practice in our generation.

This financial raid on education has been accompanied by a drive with-
out parallel against the freedom and independence of the teaching profes-
sion. Since the first World War more laws have been passed interferring
with the freedom of teaching in public schools than in all of our previous
educational history put together.1611 The policies and legislation restrict-
ing educational freedom in our day may be divided into two major types.
The first represents annoying restrictions which do not present any grave
immediate obstacle to educational freedom but do set an extremely
dangerous precedent for far more sweeping drives against the teaching
profession and educational independence. The other type represents
menacing immediate threats to the independence and integrity of our
educational process.

We shall first consider some representative examples of the growing
body of annoying restrictions upon teachers. In a number of states
there has been a definite movement to break down the separation of
church and state which the framers of the Constitution particularly
cherished. In 12 states the reading of the Bible in public schools is com-
pulsory, while in 24 it has been made permissible. The State of North
Dakota prescribes by law that the Ten Commandments shall be posted on
the walls of every schoolroom in the state. In four states, it is legal to
give religious instruction on school time, and in 30 states such instruction
during school hours is practiced without authority of the law. Directly
associated with this tendency to mix religion and public affairs was the
campaign to outlaw the teaching of evolution. Between 1921 and 1929,
37 anti-evolution bills were introduced in some 20 legislatures; mainly in
the South and West. Four such laws were passed, the State of Oklahoma,
however, later repealing its law. Where sweeping anti-evolution legis-
lation has not been possible, Fundamentalists have been able to ban the
teaching of evolution by bringing pressure upon textbook companies,
boards of education, and teachers. In the public schools and smaller
colleges of the South and West the teaching of evolution remains highly
precarious.

Patriotic instruction in the schools has been notably extended since the
first World War. If the instruction given were of a broad and funda-
mental type, this would be a notable gain. But, for the most part,
patriotic instruction is of a narrow and provincial type, the ultimate result
of which is to give the student a warped idea of both his own country and
the other states of the world. Moreover, the teaching of patriotism has
become identified with a defense of the present economic order as well as
of our country. Indeed, in the District of Columbia any instruction
dealing with the principles of Communism was banned by law in 1935.
This is logically as indefensible as to identify patriotism with the teach-
ing of some form of economic radicalism. There is a large amount of

10aSee American Civil Liberties Union Bulletin, "The Gag on Teaching," 1940.

784 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

flag-saluting and other patriotic ritual prescribed by law today. In
14 states, flag-saluting ceremonies are required. In 13 states general
patriotic exercises are demanded by law. The flag-saluting legislation
has borne particularly hard upon certain religious sects, notably Jehovah's
Witnesses, who have conscientious scruples against this type of cere-
monial. A number of pupils belonging to this sect have been expelled
from public schools.165

In some 29 states the teaching of foreign languages below the junior
high school grades is prohibited by law. This is obviously contrary to
all sound pedagogical principles. The logical time to begin such in-
struction is in the elementary grades.

Some 43 states compel the teaching of the Constitution. On the face
of it, this is an admirable idea. But the instruction given is usually
totally unenlightened. Little realistic information is given as to the
background or nature of our Constitution. Instruction under these laws
is primarily an attack upon intellectual and economic liberalism. It is
usually as far removed in spirit and content from the political ideals of
those who framed our Constitution as it is from the principles which
dominate Soviet Russia or the Fascist states of Europe. Some 21 states
specifically require the teaching of patriotism, and in almost all instances
this teaching consists of a fervent defense of the Constitution, of the
major political parties, and of the capitalistic system.160

The most novel, and in many ways the most ominous, of all this
restrictive legislation requires teachers to take special oaths of loyalty to
the Constitution. Such an oath is not usually required of other public
servants, but it is now prescribed by law for teachers in some 24 states.
The campaign of publicity which led to these loyalty oaths was led by
the Hearst press, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and other
groups devoted to a rather narrow conception of patriotism. In the light
of the wide-spread criticism of Hearst's inflammatory statements just
preceding the assassination of President McKinley, it was somewhat
ironical to find the Hearst press taking the lead in upholding the principle
of loyalty to the American Constitution. These loyalty oaths in them-
selves are not directly dangerous. But, as a precedent for further re-
strictive legislation, they are extremely menacing. They may readily be
followed by other laws specifically interpreting what is meant by loyalty
to the Constitution. Or, boards of education may interpret loyalty to
mean fanatical support of a particular economic theory or political
regime.

We may now turn to those phases of the limitation of the freedom of
teaching which are immediately menacing to academic freedom. We
may first make reference to the attempt to restrict the activities of

16b See W. G. Fennel and Edward J. Friedlander, "Compulsory Flag Salute in the
Schools," American Civil Liberties Union Bulletin, 1938.
ific See H. A. Bennett, The Constitution in School and College, Putnam, 1935,

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 785

students with regard to the freedom of intellectual discussion.17 There
is rarely any effort to curb reactionary publications or educational or-
ganizations. Seldom, if ever, is an extremely reactionary speaker denied
the right to address any university group. There have, however, been
many cases of censorship or suppression of liberal publications in schools
and colleges, and in numerous instances the editors have been disciplined
or even expelled from the institution. The articles have rarely been
objected to on the ground of obscenity or bad taste. Most of them have
presented a liberal point of view on economic doctrines. Liberal clubs
and other progressive forums have been frequently suppressed. World
famous liberals have been denied the right to address student groups.
Among such persons have been Mrs. Dora Russell, Scott Nearing,
Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, Kirby Page, John Nevin Sayre,
and others of equal prominence. At a time when the R.O.T.C. was gain-
ing ground in our institutions of higher learning, peace meetings organ-
ized by students were frequently suppressed and the organizers of such
meetings disciplined. Liberal textbooks have been vigorously attacked,
most notorious being the drive against the social studies texts prepared
by Harold Rugg. Most of the texts attacked were to be criticized, if at
all, for their excessive moderation and timidity.

In the last decade or so there have been many dismissals of college
professors because they have sponsored some form of intellectual liberal-
ism. Among the most conspicuous cases have been the dismissal of Max
F. Meyer from University of Missouri in 1930, of Herbert Adolphus Miller
from Ohio State University in 1931, of Ralph E. Turner from University
of Pittsburgh in 1934, of Jerome Davis from Yale University in 1937,
and of Granville Hicks from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Pro-
fessor Meyer had given advice relative to a dignified sex questionnaire.
Professor Miller had opposed compulsory military training and other
forms of reactionary policy. Professor Turner had collaborated with
Governor Pinchot in progressive labor legislation. Professor Davis had
defended the scholarly views relative to the origins of the first World
War, had advocated that Christianity support the cause of social justice,
and had participated prominently in the work of the American Federation
of Teachers. Professor Hicks was dismissed for assigning Henry George's
Progress and Poverty as reading in a course in American literature. In
addition to the teachers dismissed, many more were compelled to exercise
great discretion in their teaching, a situation which more sweepingly
hampers intellectual freedom than do the relatively few dismissals of
courageous teachers. There is no record of any professor having been
dismissed because of reactionary teachings, though many American pro-
fessors have definitely fascist leanings and both hold and teach opinions
far more contrary to the American Constitution than moderate Socialism.

17 See the valuable recent booklet, "What Freedom for American Students?"
prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union, April, 1941.

786 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

A particularly menacing technique which has been adopted by many
adroit and reactionary college presidents is that of exercising a vast
amount of care in selecting the teaching staff, so as to appoint only con-
servative professors. Then much publicity is given to the fact that the
utmost freedom is accorded to these men, who never entertain a progres-
sive idea.18

Perhaps the greatest threat to academic freedom today is the savagery
meted out to those who take any prominent part in promoting the organ-
ization of teachers, particularly in working for membership in the Amer-
ican Federation of Teachers. It is extremely precarious for public school
teachers to take any steps leading to the organization of units of the
American Federation of Teachers, and in many colleges solicitation of
membership in the Teachers Union places a professor in grave jeopardy.
This situation is particularly lamentable because it is readily apparent
that only the thoroughgoing organization of teachers can give the teaching
profession any real professional security and independence.

An especially vicious attack on the Teachers Union was made in New
York City in 1940-41 by the Rapp-Coudert Legislative Committee, which
attempted to smear the Union with communism and to intimidate teach-
ers in high schools and colleges who belonged to the Union. As the
Committee for the Defense of Public Education pointed out, the doings
of the Ilapp-Coudert Committee were strangely reminiscent of the edu-
cational practices of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. A schoolgirl's
home was invaded at night by a process server. Teachers were dis-
charged on the wildest accusations made by those who held some per-
sonal grudge against them. One college teacher was thrown into jail on
an apparently trumped-up charge of perjury. Membership lists and
records of the Teachers Union were illegally seized. Union members
were shadowed by plainclothesmen. Youthful students were subjected
to Third Degree methods. Hearings were frequently held in secret, and
so on.19

Some protection has been afforded to teachers by the growth of tenure
laws since the first World War. Back in 1924, some 37 states had no
tenure legislation of any sort, and only imperfect protection was afforded
by the other 11 states. The situation has improved considerably since
that time, mainly as a result of agitation by the American Federation
of Teachers, aided by some aggressive teachers' organizations. The Na-
tional Education Association thus summarizes the situation:

Today 15 states and Alaska have no state tenure laws; 37 and Hawaii have
either tenure laws continuing contract laws, or provision for long-term contracts.
Seven and Hawaii provide permanent tenure after a probationary period; 16
grant permanent tenure in certain districts; ten provide for continuing contracts;

18 See below, p. 788.

19 Bella V. Dodd, "The Conspiracy Against the Schools," Committee for the De-
fense of Public Education, N. Y., 1941. See also the cogent criticism of the Rapp-
Coudert Committee by James Marshall, president of the Board of Education of New
York City, in the spring of 1942.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 787

four permit the signing of contracts for more than one-year periods, at least in
certain districts; one allows local citizens to vote permanent tenure in each
district.20

In the better colleges and universities it is usual for permanent tenure
to be granted after a probationary period, often three years. But this
provision usually applies only to faculty members above the rank of
instructor, and it can be readily evaded even in case of full professors.

The Problem of Academic Freedom

When academic freedom is discussed, it is usually believed that the
most serious aspect of the situation lies in the occasional dismissals of
progressive and courageous teachers. However, these dismissals con-
stitute the least menacing aspect. The worst feature is that the generally
conservative and traditional cast of our educational system brings about
a condition which produces teachers .entirely in accord with a regime of
intellectual lethargy and cultural lag. The great majority of teachers
have nothing to say which would disturb anybody, even the most alert
patrioteer and plutocrat. They have no feeling that their freedom is in
any way threatened by reactionary pressure and propaganda. Few
teachers entertain opinions about our world which differ in any notable
way from those of the man in the street except, very often, to be more
romantic and antiquated. This is the most distressing thing about the
whole intellectual atmosphere of American education. It also explains
why most teachers have little or no sympathy with their courageous col-
leagues who get into difficulties. Perhaps the most pathetic figure in
education today is the teacher of the social sciences who does not have
any gense of being restricted in his teaching. No more damaging, if
unconscious, confession of incompetence could well be imagined.

There is a considerable number of relatively intelligent teachers who
entertain sensible ideas and sound convictions and are personally pro-
gressive in their outlook. But the social pressures intimidate them and
force them into extremely discreet ways. They could bring reality into
the classroom, but hesitate to do so, for fear of getting involved in diffi-
culties and possibly losing their professional security. It is obvious that
it is a more serious matter to find 50 teachers who might say something
worth while but do not dare to do so, than it is to find one teacher who
speaks out and gets dismissed for doing so. This situation produces a
soul-searing hypocrisy among teachers, which has been pointed out by
Howard K. Beale in his book Are Teachers Free?:

Lack of freedom leads to a more disastrous quality than cowardice, namely,
hypocrisy. The author was appalled by its prevalence. From one end of this
country to another children are being trained under teachers who, if one is
realistic, must be branded hypocrites.

They solemnly teach the evils of alcohol; they drink discreetly in private.
They know of crying evils in the community, and their pupils know that they

20 Data supplied in May 1942 by the Research Division of the National Education
Association.

788 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

know of them. Yet in class they teach beautiful theories in the abstract and
then praise the local men responsible for flagrant violations of those theories;
outside of class they fawn on these same bad citizens because they are powerful
or socially important.

They teach ideal forms of government and teach children to believe that that
is the way democracy really works. Later these children make contact with the
local machine or corruption in high places and then realize that their teacher
knew about all of it, even when he was describing to them empty forms that
would blind them to any evils in the system.

They express one set of views in the classroom and in public places; they hold
a different faith among intimate friends. Usually teachers rationalize all of this
double dealing out of existence. They are forced to it; so they find theories to
support it.

The greatest hypocrisy of all is their educational theory. They solemnly talk
of all sorts of fine purposes of education. Yet they teach on entirely different
principles when they get into the classroom. The present author has talked to
superintendents who have made to him solemn statements which, while the
superintendent was making them, he knew from irrefutable evidence were abso-
lutely untrue.

America needs, not better ideals of education, but educators who will not
pretend to follow thorn unless they really do. This pretense extends down
through the whole school system. Teachers, over and over again, have apologized
for something they were doing or teaching by explaining that they knew better,
but of course it would not be discreet to teach it. They did not see that this
admission damned them more completely than ignorance.21

We have already referred to the revival of extensive dismissals of pro-
fessors since the first World War. Considering the number of professors
now engaged in teaching, however, the total of those dismissed in the last
20 years is not alarming. Far more important is the situation to which
we have referred, namely, the intimidation of many progressive teachers,
and the tendency to select a conservative and tried teaching force, so
that it will be extremely rare that any cause for dismissal will arise.
Special stress is laid upon the complete freedom accorded to this carefully
picked faculty. It is obvious that this method is far more sinister and
effective than the forthright firing of a few courageous men. As Pro-
fessor Willard Waller has observed, "principles of academic freedom have
little to do with the case. Most of the teachers do not even realize that
they are not free." This method of sterilizing the academic intellect is
particularly safe and effective because it never arouses any serious pro-
tests. When a famous professor is dropped, much publicity ensues. But
the quiet intellectual emasculation of a whole faculty by a careful selec-
tion of the teaching force is a matter which never receives adverse
publicity; indeed, receives no publicity at all. This adroit procedure was
first introduced by President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University
and is known as "the Lowell formula," but it has become very general
among the more respectable institutions of higher learning. Yale Uni-
versity has been the only distinguished institution of higher learning
which has recently resorted to the old-fashioned method of dismissing a
well-known professor outright.

21 Are American Teachers Free? Scribner, 1936, pp. 776-777.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 789

Teachers have created various organizations designed to protect them.
Conspicuous has been the American Association of University Professors,
which was organized in 1915. This has given special attention to prob-
lems of academic tenure and to investigations of dismissals. It has
handed in many masterly reports upon specific episodes of academic
martyrdom. It seems probable that these must have exerted some re-
straining influence upon the more reactionary college presidents. But,
on the whole, the protection offered by the Association is extremely
limited. It rarely acts until after a professor has been dismissed. Hence,
its main function is to prepare eloquent and authoritative academic
obituaries. Indeed, the Association does the martyred professors far
more harm than good. It gives much publicity to each case and thereby
scares off college presidents, deans, and professors from offering the dis-
missed professor another position no matter how capable the man may be.
Dr. Donald Slesingcr contends that no professor of prominence, who has
been dropped from an American university and has been given publicity
— however favorable — by the American Association of University Pro-
fessors, has ever been able to obtain another satisfactory academic
appointment. The greatest reflection upon the teaching profession is the
fact that, more often than not, it is the professors rather than the uni-
versity presidents and deans who most frequently refuse to recommend
the appointment of a professor who has been dismissed from another
institution, no matter how creditable the dismissal was to the professor
who was dropped.

Dr. Donald Slesinger, who has filled some of the most important
executive positions in American education, among them a deanship at
one of America's leading universities, places the responsibility for the
amazing lack of professorial independence and freedom squarely upon
the professors themselves:

The plain conclusion of my experience forced on me was this: that, with few
exceptions, the professors themselves were the greatest enemies of academic
freedom. In places where it was irrelevant they used the slogan [of freedom]
precisely as the Republicans used the Constitution in the last campaign [1936],
as a weapon of reaction; where it was relatively unimportant they gave it
lip service but no cash; and where it really mattered their opposition was open
and bitter and unscrupulous.22

In the opinion of Dr. Slesinger, most professors are themselves conven-
tional and reactionary in their social and political outlook. They do
not sympathize with those of their colleagues who get into trouble be-
cause of progressive ideals. This agrees with the view taken by Pro-
fessor Beale regarding the usual attitude of a college professor toward
a colleague who has got into trouble by being overcandid: "Well, of
course it's true, but why did the damned fool want to say so?" The
only interest of the usual run of college professors in academic freedom
relates to their own security. They are usually absorbed in petty routine

22 "Professor's Freedom," Harper's, October, 1937.

790 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

matters of academic life. They are thoroughly trained in docility by
the very facts of the academic regimen. Dr. Slesinger illustrates his
point, for example, by the fracas at the University of Chicago, where a
raid against certain liberal social science professors was launched by
Hearst and a Chicago drug merchant by the name of Walgreen. It is
popularly supposed that the victory for academic freedom was won
through the resolute and courageous action of the Chicago faculty. As a
matter of fact, it was won through the steadfast and courageous attitude
of President Robert M. Hutchins and a very few of the more progressive
Chicago professors. The majority of the faculty were indifferent, scared,
or hostile toward the professors who were attacked. The victory for
academic freedom was a triumph over the majority of the faculty as
well as over Hearst and Walgreen:

Eventually there was a public hearing, and the excellent showing of the uni-
versity won the acclaim even of the pusillanimous. But that showing was due
to the persistence of the president and the backing he received from such men
as Charles E. Mcrriam, who admitted that the university was progressive, and
was willing to take his full share of the responsibility for making it so; and
Robert Morss Lovett, who knew that pacifists went to jail but insisted on
remaining one. The victory was not over Hearst and Walgreen alone, but over
the weak-kneed conformists of one of the most independent faculties of the
country.28

Perhaps the reductio ad absurdum of the whole discussion of academic
freedom was the statement recently made by a cultivated and learned,
but reactionary, publicist, to the effect that academic freedom means
only "freedom concerning those things which are purely academic." He
went on to say that this means that teachers should expect to have free-
dom of discussion only in regard to those literary, philosophical, and
mathematical issues which have no practical bearing on life and society.
The American Civil Liberties Union has recently drawn up a Bill of
Rights for Teachers which appears sensible and fair to all parties con-
cerned. Its essentials are summarized in the following five points:

1. The teacher's freedom in investigation should be restricted only by the
demands of his assigned teaching duties.

,2. The teacher's freedom in presenting his own subject in the classroom or
elsewhere should not be impaired, except in extraordinary cases by specific
stipulations in advance, fully understood and accepted by both the teacher and
the institution in which he gives instruction.

3. The teacher, when he speaks or writes outside of the institution on subjects
not within his own field of study, is entitled to precisely the same freedom and
is subject to the same responsibility as attach to all other citizens.

4. No teacher should be dismissed or otherwise disciplined because of his
beliefs or membership in any lawful organization. Charges of improper actions
by a teacher should relate to specific instances of asserted misconduct. They
should not be based merely upon inferences drawn from the fact of organizational
affiliations of a legal character.

5. The contention that certain organizations impose obligations on their
members inconsistent with their duties as teachers, is no ground for disciplining

28 Slesinger, loc. cit.

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 791

them. If this contention is as all embracing as it is supposed to be, then the
teachers' conduct will produce grounds for disciplinary action; if not, the uni-
versality of the statement is open to such serious question that disciplinary action
is not warranted on mere membership alone.24

One should keep in mind the fact that academic freedom means not
only freedom for teachers but also freedom for students to organize their
societies, carry on free discussion, have reputable speakers address them,
and air their grievances in dignified fashion relative to the administra-
tion, and the faculty. The American Civil Liberties Union has recently
published the results of a comprehensive examination of this subject.25

On the whole, college students have rather more freedom for organiza-
tion and discussion than they did a generation back. But there are still
many severe handicaps to full intellectual freedom for students, short
of any license or obvious abuses of freedom. There is widespread intol-
erance of somewhat radical students organizations, like the American
Student Union, and in some cases even towards the mild liberal clubs.
The college press is pretty well censored in a majority of colleges and
universities. Compulsory military training is in operation in many
universities, especially state universities. Peace meetings and protests
against war were widely discouraged or prohibited altogether for several
years before our entry into the second World War. Thirteen students
were dismissed en bloc from the University of Michigan in 1940 for
alleged radical and pacific affiliations. Radical and pacifist speakers are
wridcly banned on college campuses. There is no instance of the banning
of any notorious reactionary. Student self-government is a rare excep-
tion. Conservative pressures of various kinds, both within and outside
the student body, serve to repress student liberalism and independence.
As the report well summarizes the situation: "In the face of these mani-
fold pressures it is encouraging that freedom for student activities fares
as well as it does." 26

The Organization of Teachers

Thoughtful educators generally admit that the educational forces of
the country cannot rise to a position of social effectiveness in the realm
of social change unless they are able to present an organized front against
the opposition of the vested interests. There are few persons more help-
less than the isolated teacher. The average teacher is not well trained
to enter any other dignified and prosperous profession. If the teacher
loses his or her job, economic disaster stares the unfortunate person in
the face. Teachers' salaries are not sufficient to allow the accumulation
of a sufficient financial reserve to provide for economic independence.
Moreover, no teacher is today absolutely indispensable.

24 Bulletin, February 2, 1942.

25 "What Freedom for American Students?" April, 1941.

26 Loc. cit.f p. 44.

792 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

The surplus of unemployed teachers is vastly greater than in any pre-
ceding decade. Normal schools, teachers' colleges, and graduate schools
are turning out an ever greater army of formally qualified instructors.
At the same time, the depression has restricted the number of posts
available. Foreign teachers, fleeing from oppression abroad, have also
taken many of the college and university posts formerly open to native-
born teachers. Supply outruns demand as never before in American
public education. Conditions bid fair to get worse. As war costs in-
crease, the proportion of public funds allotted to education will be cut
down. The decline of income from private investments may make it
necessary to curtail or close down many, if not most, endowed schools
and colleges. With over 200,000 unemployed certified teachers, the
threat of resignation by a harassed teacher will achieve nothing. Scores
of qualified teachers stand eager to seize the position left vacant. No
professional esprit de corps is in operation to restrain them from such
procedure. Not only are the teachers unorganized as a group, but they
have few affiliations to serve as protection, in case they find it necessary
to run counter to the social and economic prejudices of the community.

Therefore, it is overwhelmingly obvious that the first step in attaining
any position of social leadership must be a nation-wide organization
of the teaching profession. Only in this way can teachers achieve a
powerful united front in promoting the movement for rational social
change. Standing alone, the teacher is fair game for sniping and per-
secution by those who are blind to the necessity of social change.

There are, of course, dangers, as well as advantages in organization.
The fundamental purpose of the organization of teachers is to promote
social effectiveness on a broad scale. But organizations have a fatal
tendency to degenerate into selfish pressure groups, dominated primarily
by the aim of promoting the interests of the organization and securing
offices and emoluments for its officialdom. Selfish bureaucracy all too
cften replaces social vision and public spiritedness.

The movement for the organization of teachers must be accompanied
by a persistent consciousness of the necessity of preserving a humane
§ocial perspective, without at the same time sacrificing any fundamentals
of organized strength. Above all, organized teachers must repudiate
such antisocial and conservative practices as are found all too frequently
in some labor organizations in the United States. The union of teachers
can assure social leadership only when its philosophy and practices dem-
onstrate a sincere devotion to social betterment for mankind.

The chief teachers' organization in the country is the American Fed-
eration of Teachers, founded in 1916. It is affiliated with the American
Federation of Labor. It has over 25,000 members, with more than 250
locals. While the membership is scattered throughout the country, most
of it is concentrated in the larger cities, particularly New York, Chicago,
St. Paul, Minneapolis, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Wash-
ington, Atlanta, and Chattanooga. Its members are drawn mainly from
public school teachers in these larger cities, though a number of the

EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS 793

more progressive college professors belong to the Federation. The Fed-
eration has announced its program as follows:

To bring associations of teachers into relations of mutual assistance and
cooperation.

To obtain for them all the rights to which they are entitled.

To raise the standard of the teaching profession by securing the conditions
essential to the best professional service.

To promote such a democratization of the schools as will enable them better
to equip their pupils to take their place in the industrial, social and political
life of the community.

The Federation has worked chiefly through influencing public opinion
and securing favorable legislation, especially teacher's tenure laws, and
has never resorted to strike tactics. It has accomplished a great deal in
promoting legislation with respect to tenure, salaries, teachers' pensions,
and the like. It was mainly responsible for the passage of the unique
state-wide permanent tenure act passed in the State of Pennsylvania. It
has fought vigorously against the attempt to gag teachers through re-
strictive legislation. It has also frequently investigated dismissals. Its
investigation and report on the case of Jerome Davis at Yale was an
especially impressive piece of work. An international Federation of
Teachers' Associations, having something over half a million members,
has been organized, with headquarters originally in Paris.

As we hinted above, the work of the Federation and the movement
to secure more members have been hampered by the local intimidation of
active teacher organizers within the Federation. Moreover, many teach-
ers not only fear to join the Federation, but are even disinclined to do
so because it is affiliated with the labor movement. The teachers are
still, to a large degree, victims of "the American dream," which makes
the terms "labor movement" and "unionism" synonomous with manual
labor and servility. On the whole, one may concede that the movement
for the organization of teachers mainly indicates hope for the future
rather than an assured achievement.

This chapter should drive home the fact that the teachers of America
face the necessity of deciding whether they will "serve Jehovah or
Baal." Serving the latter may seem the easiest way; but in the end
it will bring far greater disaster to education than a resolute determina-
tion on the part of educators to make good their pretensions to serving
as the intellectual leaders of humanity. The depression has made it clear
what we may expect from the present social order, in even the milder
manifestations of the era of declining capitalism. What lies beyond this
may be seen from the example afforded by educational conditions in
fascist countries abroad, for Fascism represents the condition of capi-
talism in the last stages of its disintegration. If we do not move on to
a better economic order, more serious depressions, bloodier wars, and
ultimate collapse are the only alternatives.

If education boldly asserts its role as the leader in social progress, it
may avert such educational conditions as exist in fascist countries

794 EDUCATION IN THE SOCIAL CRISIS

abroad, and may also lead society into the promised land of abundance
and the good life, which will provide both security and intellectual inde-
pendence. But if it evades and delays, it will not be many years before
this opportunity will have been lost, as the social tension becomes more
marked and the already diminishing tolerance of the vested interests
evaporates entirely or is replaced by the violence of revolution.27

27 Cf. H. D. Langford, Education and Social Conflict, Macmillan, 1936.

CHAPTER XIX
Leisure/ Recreation/ and the Arts

Civilization on the Supra-Pig Level

FAB AND AWAY the greater part of human activity in the past has been
devoted to obtaining enough material necessities to make living possible.
Man has struggled for food, clothing, and shelter. He has set up forms
of government designed to make him relatively secure in the possession of
those material necessities which he has collected. Only a small segment
of humanity has ever been able to amass enough material necessities for
the enjoyment of life. And this small minority has been mainly absorbed
in amassing more material things. Only a slight amount of time and
attention has been given by this minority to the non-material interests
which it has been in an unusually favorable position to enjoy.

Certainly at least 90 per cent of mankind has failed to reach the
level of "happy pigs," for any good farmer will admit that a healthy
pig is entitled to enjoy adequate food and shelter. To a large extent, this
unfortunate condition of the majority of mankind in the past has been
due to the inadequacy of productive facilities. The tools and machines
were too inefficient to permit a sufficiently thorough conquest of nature
to assure abundance for all. To be sure, social inequalities, exploitation,
and defects in distribution all played their part in impoverishing the
masses in the past. But even an efficient social order could not have
insured plenty for everybody until after the middle of the eighteenth
century, when the empire of machines came into being. For the first
time in the history of humanity, we now have the mechanical equipment
to produce plenty for everybody. All of mankind, in civilized countries,
could attain the pig-level, and have plenty of leisure time for those
achievements on the "supra-pig" level which constitute the true and unique
human culture.

This idea that a truly human civilization lies on the supra-pig level
was first set forth by Plato in the Republic. In this book, Plato traces
the evolution of the ideal society, based upon the division of labor. He
first analyzes human material needs, and then describes the evolution of
the professions and classes necessary to provide for these needs. In the
following paragraphs Plato describes the daily life of man, after provision
has been made for supplying his material needs in abundant fashion:

Let us then consider what will be their mode of life, now that we have thus
established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes,
and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work,

795

796 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

in summer commonly stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed
and shod.

They will feed on barley meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them,
making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on
clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle.
And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have
made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning praises of the gods, in
happy converse with one another.

And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; haying
an eye to poverty or war. Of course they must have a relish-salt, and olives,
and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare;
for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast
myrtle berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a
diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and
bequeath a similar life to their children after them.1

To many, such a state of life would seem nearly Utopian. Two thirds
of the American population had not attained it in 1928 or 1929. It was
such a condition which Herbert Hoover had in mind when he promised
us in the campaign of 1928 what seemed to him a Utopia, namely, the
abolition of poverty, a chicken in every pot, and two cars in every
garage. To European workers and peasants, even before the war, this
"simple life" portrayed by Plato would have seemed even more idyllic.
European peasants could hardly afford to consume their own eggs, butter,
and milk. Even in Holland, peasants felt themselves lucky to get eggs
even on Sundays. In European and American slums there has not been
the access to fresh air and romping space which almost every well cared-
for pig enjoys.

But Plato sternly rebuked any tendency to be satisfied with material
plenty. He frankly described such a material utopia as only a "city of
happy pigs." He maintained that any civilization truly worthy of
mankind must be created on the supra-pig level. It would involve the
addition of activities and interests related to philosophy, literature, art,
drama, music, play, and athletics. These represent interests which are
not concerned with securing material necessities. Plato thus describes,
in part, the mode of existence and the type of activities which are in-
volved in. a truly human culture on the supra-pig level:

I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They
will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and per-
fumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, and all these not of one sort only,
but in every variety.

We must go beyond the necessaries of which I was first speaking, such as
houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will
have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be
procured. Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is
no longer sufficient.

Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are
not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of artists and actors,
of whom one large class have to do with forms and colors; another will be the
votaries of music-poets, and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers,

i Republic II, p. 372.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 797

contractors; also the makers of diverse kinds of articles, including women's
dresses.

And we shall want more servants. Tutors will also be in request, and nurses,
wet and dry, tirewomen, and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks, who
were not needed and therefore had no place in our former edition of the State,
but are needed now. They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of
many other kinds, if people eat them. And living in this way we shall have
much greater need of physicians than before.2

In Plato's day this was in part a dream. It was all part and parcel of
the ideal or Utopian society which he was describing in his Republic.
To be sure, a few of the more wealthy and fortunate Greeks could enjoy
this life of luxury and contemplation which Plato envisaged on the
supra-pig level. But the great majority were common workmen, peas-
ants, or slaves, who had not attained the enviable comforts of well cared-
for pigs. Indeed, even in his Utopian imaginings Plato himself planned
to have only the able minority enjoy the blessings of supra-pig ex-
istence. It is only in our time that the mechanical basis has been
provided to make possible a supra-pig existence for the whole of human-
ity in all countries which have passed out of a primitive economy.

But perhaps the most important consideration is the conception of life
on the supra-pig level. Hitherto, we have imagined that the really seri-
ous interests and activities of man should be concentrated upon getting
a living, or amassing material wealth. We have regarded leisure as ques-
tionable, indeed, as an incitement to evil-doing. We have looked upon
recreation, the arts, philosophy, and contemplation as constituting the
mere superficial frills of life, unworthy of the serious attention of earnest
persons. But, when we look at the issue realistically, the efforts to sat-
isfy material necessities, however essential, represent a relatively low
order of human activity. Man shares these interests and activities with
the beasts of the field. Those things which set him off from the rest of
the animal kingdom and constitute uniquely human concerns are those
matters which pertain almost exclusively to the supra-pig level. The
recognition of this fact and an extension of this recognition into daily
life will constitute the most fundamental revolution in the whole history
of human culture. It will also constitute an unprecedented boon to the
human race. We shall devote the remainder of this chapter to a con-
sideration of the achievement, facilities, and prospects of a supra-pig
civilization in the new era of leisure which has been created for us by
the contributions of our empire of machines.

Some Phases of the Evolution of Leisure

Leisure today in civilized areas is still based in part upon the exploita-
tion of human beings. But it is founded primarily upon recent tech-
nological progress. Machines have become more and more efficient and
hence less man-power is needed to produce the goods required. Down

2 Ibid., II, 372-373.

798 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

to the time of the Industrial Revolution, leisure was limited to a small
group who obtained it by the subjugation or exploitation of the rest of
the human race. Above all, slavery and serfdom were responsible for
providing most of the leisure and luxury enjoyed by the fortunate few
before our present mechanical era.

In primitive society, men, who had to be free to hunt and fight, en-
joyed a considerable freedom from drudgery as compared with women.
There is no special evidence that the women resented this seemingly
natural and desirable division of labor.

At first certain professions enjoyed freedom from heavy labor.
Later there arose whole classes who were able to live handsomely, with-
out manual effort. Perhaps the earliest of the leisure groups in human
society were the priests, who mediated between the social groups and the
supernatural powers. So important were their services regarded that
priests were cheerfully freed from other responsibilities. When man had
thus assured his protection from the supernatural world, he had to turn
his attention to defense against mortal enemies. This necessity led to
the rise of the warrior class who were, in turn, emancipated from manual
effort. Out of the warrior group arose the rulers and the nobility, who
were able to escape any physical effort to secure material necessities by
establishing the institution of slavery and, later, serfdom. Finally, we
find the scribes and scholars, who, while they were not permitted any
complete idleness, were not compelled to engage in manual toil for their
livelihood. In certain countries, like ancient China, the scholars were
so highly esteemed that they attained almost to the level of the priest-
hood and were permitted to enjoy a life of contemplation.

The priests, nobility and regal circles constituted the bulk of the leisure
class down to the time of the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions
after 1500. In ancient Rome there was a considerable wealthy bourgeois
element — the so-called equites, or knights — who had made their money
out of various forms of commercial effort and public finance.

With the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, we come upon the rise of the bourgeois capitalists, who drew
their wealth from commercial and industrial efforts. At first, both the
merchants and the industrialists participated personally in the acqui-
sition of their riches. Though they might not indulge in any manual
work, they did labor hard in their own fields of endeavor.. With the full
development of capitalism, however, especially after the development of
the corporation and the separation of ownership from management, we
find the truly leisured bourgeoisie — the class of literal "coupon clippers."

Most of the actual work in modern industry and commerce is carried
on by engineers, business managers, clerks, and other functionaries. The
true capitalist simply hands over his money to be invested by bankers
and brokers, taking little or no active part in the management of busi-
ness concerns. As we have already pointed out, this type of capitalist
is doubly separated from active business endeavor. Through the corpo-
ration and the holding company, control of business has been divorced

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 799

from its ownership. In turn, active management is partly divorced from
control. The actual direction of industry and commerce is in the hands
of trained business executives. Boards of directors of corporations
rarely participate directly in the details of business operation. Only
in the so-called "little business" do the owners take a direct and imme-
diate part in the administration of their concerns.

It cannot be denied that the leisure classes in the past have been re-
sponsible for most of what we ordinarily regard as civilization. The
leisure class first established political order on a large scale, thus making
life relatively safe and insuring some degree of law and justice. Their
needs, interests, and whims led to great engineering projects, from the
pyramids of ancient Egypt to the roads and aqueducts of Rome and the
cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The leisure class has been the patron of
art. The ancient temples, palaces, mansions, sculptures, and paintings
were produced for, and supported by, those who enjoyed wealth and
leisure. The same was true of learning — literature, philosophy, and sci-
ence. From the rites of the primitive medicine man to the great inter-
national state which was medieval Catholicism, religion has been in the
hands of a leisure group. The great business structures of modern
times have been, to a large extent, the creation of the bourgeois entre-
preneur.

These achievements, however, were not solely the product of the leisure
class. The actual labor connected with all of these projects — the fight-
ing, the government, the engineering, the artistic achievements, the
philosophical systems, the machines, and factory administration have
been carried out by men who worked hard.3 For example, the Great
Pyramid of Gizeh contains about two and a half million limestone blocks,
weighing on a average of two and a half tons each. They had to be
dragged in blistering heat by man-power for many miles. It is said that
100,000 men worked on the pyramid for twenty years. Though they
could not have functioned without the support of the wealthy and
leisured, the men who wrought these impressive achievements enjoyed
relatively little leisure themselves.

We must not overlook the enormous price that man has paieh for the
services rendered by the wealthy. The slave system was accompanied
by incredible cruelty and depredation, practiced upon countless millions
of human beings who often led an existence below the level of the more
fortunate domestic animals. This deplorable situation is thus described
by Professor Breasted in writing of Roman slavery:

The life of the slaves on the great plantations was little better than that of
beasts. Worthy and free-born men from the eastern Mediterranean were branded
with a hot iron like oxen, to identify them forever. They were herded at night
in cellar barracks, and in the morning were driven like half-starved beasts of
burden to work in the fields. The green fields of Italy, where sturdy farmers
once watched the growing grain sown and cultivated by their own hands, were

3 See C. 0, Ward, The Ancient Lowly, 2 vols., Kerr, 1907.

800 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

now worked by wretched and hopeless creatures who wished that they had never
been born.4

Most of those who escaped from slavery led a life of poverty and
misery. It is probably true that, down to our own day, the overwhelm-
ing majority of men and women would have been better off if they had
died at birth. They enjoyed little which makes life truly worth living.
Moreover, the leisure class has partly wasted in luxury and debauchery
the products of slavery and grinding poverty on the part of the exploited
masses. Only a small portion of the wealth created as a result of human
exploitation has gone into imperishable works of art or immortal systems
of philosophy. This luxury and waste have encouraged and all too often
actually caused the economic ruin of successive civilizations. Through
its control over political life, the leisure class has been responsible for
most of the graft and incompetence which have led to the decay of king-
doms, empires, and republics. And, if one adopts a puritanical standard
of judgment, the leisure class has been responsible for most of the "sin"
which has existed in the world, from the days of ancient Babylon to the
Bourbon court of eighteenth century France and the cafe society of
American metropolitan society.

Under modern capitalism the leisure class has developed numbers,
power, wealth, and prestige beyond comparison with anything which
existed in the pre-industrial age. With the growth of large fortunes,
there has come about a marked proclivity to attach much prestige to the
possession of vast riches and to venerate the various social rites and
frolics that opulence induces in conduct.5

Of all these attitudes, none is more important than the element of "con-
spicuous waste," as a criterion of the possession of wealth. Nothing is a
more dramatic proof of economic independence than the ability to waste
huge sums of money on nonsocial and nonproductive enterprises, such as
ostentatious dress and equipage, elaborate and wasteful forms of social
entertainment, and grotesquely pretentious and elaborate dwellings.
Above all stands complete abstinence from any sign of manual labor.
Since these forms of conduct and such psychic attitudes are supposed to
characterize the most-to-be-envied of all classes in modern society, they
have become the approved norms for the creation of reverence and defer-
ential obeisance on the part of the masses.

Along with this reverence for the characteristic attitudes and practices
associated with great wealth we have the parallel effort of the wealthy
to insist upon the servility of the laboring classes. The latter are stig-
matized by the necessity of manual labor, in the same way that the
wealthy are distinguished by their general abstinence from any such
menial effort. It has been possible thus far to make the industrial
proletariat defer to the standards and tastes of the wealthy and, at the

4J. H. Breasted, Ancient Times, Ginn and Company, Second Edition, 1935, p.
642.

6 See below, pp. 801-803, 844, 846.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 801

same time, to accept as somewhat inevitable its lowly status. It is true
that there are some signs of a decline of the theories and practices of the
leisure class among the more wealthy. There is also a growing reluctance
on the part of the industrial proletariat to accept as inevitable their lowly
and servile station. Nevertheless, the situation described has prevailed
very generally during the last century or more. In order to illustrate
more fully what is meant by the theory of the leisure class and their
methods of "honorific consumption" and "conspicuous waste," we refer
the reader to an earlier quotation from Veblen's remarkable book The
Theory of the Leisure Class*

Professor Veblen's abstractions may be given greater vividness by the
following description of the conspicuous waste practiced by the American
rich in the latter part of the nineteenth century, taken from Matthew
Josephson's The Robber Barons:

Limited in their capacity of enjoyment and bored, yet prompted to outdo each
other in prodigality, the New Rich experimented with ever new patterns or
devices of consumption. In the late 70's, the practice of hiring hotel rooms or
public restaurants for social functions had become fashionable. At Delmonico's
the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners of the socially prominent succeeded each
other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold
bracelet with the monogram of the host. At another, cigarettes rolled in hun-
dred-dollar-bins were passed around after the coffee and consumed with an
authentic thrill. . . . One man gave a dinner to his dog, and presented him
with a diamond collar worth $15,000. At another dinner, costing $20,000, each
guest discovered in one of his oysters a magnificent black pearl. Another dis-
tracted individual longing for diversion had little holes bored into his teeth, into
which a tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds; when he walked abroad
his smile flashed and sparkled in the sunlight. . .

As the years pass new heights of fantasy and extravagance are touched. One
season, it is a ball on horseback which is the chief sensation. To a great hotel the
guests all come in riding habit; each of the handsomely groomed horses, equipped
with rubber-padded shoes, prances about bearing besides its millionaire rider a
miniature table holding truffles and champagne. Finally a costume ball given
by Bradley Martin, a New York aristocrat, in 1897, reached the very climax of
lavish expenditure and "dazed the entire Western world." "The interior of the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was transformed into a replica of Versailles, and rare
tapestries, beautiful flowers and countless lights made an effective background for
the wonderful gowns and their wearers. . ." One lady, impersonating Mary
Stuart, wore a gold-embroidered gown, trimmed with pearls and precious stones.
"The suit of gold inlaid armor worn by Mr. Belmont was valued at ten thousand
dollars." 7

How the poor were living in the slums of New York at the time is evident
from the following case, cited by Smith Hart in his The New Yorkers:

In a dark cellar filled with smoke, there sleep, all in one room, with no kind of
partition dividing them, two men with their wives, a girl of thirteen or fourteen,
two men and a large boy of about seventeen years of age, a mother with two

BSee above, pp. 192-193.

7 Harcourt Brace, 1934, pp. 33&-3S9. See the famous work of Jacob A. Riis, How
the Other Half Lives, for a description of the horrible poverty in which the masses
were living in New York at this time.

802 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

more boys, one about ten years old, and one large boy of fifteen; another woman
with two boys, nine and eleven years of age — in all fourteen persons.7*

That the wealthy men of the late nineteenth century made any con-
tribution to the arts and to civilization at all commensurable with their
wealth and economic power may well be doubted. The noted New
England scholar and publicist, Charles Francis Adams, said of them:

Indeed, as I approach the end, I am more than a little puzzled to account for
the instances I have seen of business success — money-getting. It comes from
rather a low instinct. Certainly so far as my observation goes, it is scarcely
met with in combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character.
I have known, and known tolerably well, a great many "successful" men — "big"
financially — men famous during the last half century, and a less interesting crowd
I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to
meet again either in this world or the next ; nor is one associated in my mind with
the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and
traders, they were essentially unattractive. The fact is that money-getting like
everything else calls for a special aptitude and great concentration, and for it I
did not have the first in any marked degree, while to it I never gave the last. So,
in now summing up, I may account myself fortunate in having got out of my
ventures as well as I did.8

A similar opinion was expressed by Theodore Roosevelt:

I am simply unable to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the
very wealthy men which such an enormous multitude of people evidently really
feel. I am delighted to show my courtesy to Pierpont Morgan or Andrew Car-
negie or James J. Hill, but as for regarding any one of them as, for instance, I
regard Prof. Bury, or Peary, the Arctic explorer, or Rhodes, the historian — why,
I could not force myself to do it even if I wanted to, which I don't.9

While the great industrialists and financial leaders of modern capi-
talism may have lacked a fine artistic sense themselves, and while they
have not made any contributions to art and civilization at all propor-
tionate to their wealth and power, they have, nevertheless, made notable .
additions to our culture. They have collected great paintings from
abroad and have endowed art museums in which to store and exhibit
them. They have founded and endowed many libraries. They have
given extensively to higher education, to scientific foundations, and to
• various research enterprises. Though they have seldom stimulated
original work in the arts and scholarship, they have done much to make
publicly available already existing artistic work and scholarly achieve-
ment. But it must not be forgotten that many of their benefactions have
been dictated quite as much by self-interest as by artistic and scholarly
enthusiasm. As Horace Coon has made clear in his penetrating study of
foundations, Money to Burn, the wealthy have created their foundations
and endowments in part as a defensive measure. When any reform
group proposes a change in the economic system or more drastic taxation
of wealth, it is at once alleged that such persons are really trying to

™ Lee, Furman, Inc., publishers, 1938, p. 156.
8 Cited in Josephson, op. cit., p. 338«
» Ibid., p. 337,

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 803

destroy art, culture, and scientific research. We may now turn to further
developments in the expansion of leisure and its responsibilities.

The innovation which has worked by far the greatest revolution in the
history of leisure has been modern machinery. For a century or more
after the Industrial Revolution new lines of industry opened up to absorb
those thrown out of work by mechanical inventions. Moreover, the
earlier machines did not displace so many workmen as the new and more
efficient machines which have been devised since the World War.

In 1915 there appeared the most ominous of all developments in the
history of material culture — the automatic continuous-process machine
and factory, capable of turning out incredible quantities of identical
products and adapted to the production of everything from cigarettes to
dwelling houses.10 In the first two industrial revolutions man had to
watch and run his machines. Now, in the third, he can have, by means
of the photo-electric eye, machines which watch and run other machines
or run themselves.

This colossal new reservoir of productive capacity has scarcely been
recognized, even by economic historians. Coupled with the improba-
bility of any vast new industries remaining to be opened up, it makes the
probable technological unemployment of the future entirely out of the
range of comparison with any in the past. It is as futile to try to com-
pare the oxcart to the automobile as to bring into comparison technologi-
cal unemployment before and after the rise of the automatic machine and
continuous-process factory. Therefore, while technological unemploy-
ment has existed from the coup-de-poing (fist hatchet) of the early stone
age down to one of our modern match machines, that which faces us in
the future not only is different in degree from anything in the past; it
differs in kind. In the light of these facts, the propagandistic character
of the arguments of W. J. Cameron, Simeon Strunsky, Walter Lippmann,
and others, to the effect that the invention of automatic machinery only
creates new employment, is readily apparent.

The rise of the empire of machines has produced a great revolution
with respect to the character of leisure and the numbers that participate
therein. Before efficient machines revolutionized industry a few decades
back, ten, twelve and even fourteen-hour days were not uncommon.
Only fifty years ago it was customary for store clerks to work twelve
hours a day, six days a week. When one of America's greatest depart-
ment stores opened about sixty years ago the clerks had to work Sundays
also, save for four hours off to go to church. With the increasing effi-
ciency of machinery in our day, even those who must work for a living
generally do not work more than a third of the twenty-four hours in each
day. Indeed, if we employed our machinery to the limit of its potential
productivity, workers would not need to be employed more than four
hours a day. However, the rise of automatic machinery and other novel-
ties in mechanical efficiency, instead of shortening working hours all

10 See also above, pp. 95-97.

804 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

around, have thrown more and more persons out of work, so that we have
a vast army of unemployed persons who have forced upon them an un-
welcome but complete degree of leisure. Those not thrown out of work
must still work "full time." Nevertheless, all classes of people enjoy a
relatively great amount of leisure, compared with anything which has
existed for the masses in the past. And there is every prospect, if civi-
lization continues, that this leisure will grow in volume.

There is every probability that we shall have far more startling inven-
tions in the future than have taken place in the past. These will greatly
reduce the human effort needed in the production of both goods and food.
If we employed in the most efficient way possible the machinery which is
now available, we could certainly produce all the goods and food which
would be required for a high standard of living with not more than 15 or
20 hours of work each week. If we preserve civilization, we shall have
to spread work among all members of the population, giving each one a
relatively short working day. We cannot go on employing part of the
population on a relatively long working schedule each week, leaving
millions of others in more or less complete idleness. A vast amount of
leisure is now with us to stay. From now on, one of the major tasks
which civilization must tackle is the solution of the problem of leisure.
Thus far, a demoralizing idleness, rather than a properly socialized
leisure, has been the result of technological advances. But we must put
leisure to proper social uses, since the majority of the population can no
longer expect to keep occupied in the task of producing goods and food.

The Ethics of Leisure

There was little criticism of leisure and the leisure classes until the
end of the Middle Ages, though the Catholics did stress the fact that
God condemned man to labor as a penalty for original sin. As empha-
sized by Max Weber and his disciples, criticism of leisure was primarily
a contribution of the Protestant Revolution.

One of the major influences exerted by Protestantism upon economic life
and ideas was the impulse it gave to thrift, frugality, and the virtues of
hard manual work. This particular impetus came especially from Calvin
and his followers. They lifted from work both the taint of servility,
which had been associated with it in classical times, and the penitential
coloring attached to it in medieval Catholicism. Calvin vigorously con-
demned idleness: "For nothing is more unseemly than a man that is idle
and good for nothing — who profits neither himself nor others, and seems
born only to eat and drink. ... It is certain that idleness and in-
dolence are accursed of God." He held up to contempt "idle bellies that
chirp sweetly in the shade." Calvin himself apparently approved of
work as a preventive of sin and corporeal indulgence, quite as much as a
means to economic accumulation. Thus, there sprang up that persistent
tradition of the moral and economic blessings of gruelling toil which
pervaded modern times. When the bourgeoisie later became wealthy,
they conveniently found work a virtue chiefly for the employee class.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 805

It is obvious that the Calvinistic emphasis upon the virtue of hard
work was partly theological and partly economic. This attitude was
brought over into American tradition by writers like Benjamin Franklin.
It gained wide acceptance in this country, not only because of our
Protestant heritage, but also because the doctrine fitted in very well as a
religious and ethical justification of the hard work required to conquer
the American continent. That this philosophy of life is still popular and
respectable in American circles can be seen from the following statement
by Gus W. Dyer of Vanderbilt University, taken from an article syn-
dicated in American newspapers early in 1939. Professor Dyer was issu-
ing an implied warning that we are reverting to paganism in our new
respect for leisure:

The Christian theory of life is the very opposite of the Pagan. It puts the
emphasis on giving, not receiving, on serving, not on being served. Tne great
man, the man who has found life in the greatest abundance is the prime minister,
the greatest worker. Work is divine. God is revealed as the great worker, and
it is through work that men become like God. It is through work that man
finds his life, and his life is measured by his work. Business is a means by which
men exchange usefulness. In the exchange of commodities and services both
parties are benefited, both parties profit. The more a man gives the more he
receives. The abundant life is a by-product of hard work, or services given to
others. To run away from work is to run away from life. To repudiate work
is to commit suicide. It is through work that individuals and nations grow
strong and invincible.

From the beginning of our history down to a few years ago the rank and file
of the American citizens regarded hard work not only as a duty but also as an
honor. The hard worker was a man of distinction in his community. They had
little respect for a man who tried to avoid work, and had a contempt for a man,
able to work, who looked to the government to support him. They found their
lives and grew strong through hard constructive work, through constructive serv-
ice to their families, their communities and to their country. They accepted it as
their duty to support the government from their earnings in all of its constitu-
tional, legitimate activities, but they scorned the idea of degrading themselves
and sacrificing their independence by looking to the government to give them any
special aid.

It was the proud boast of Americans up to a few years ago that the average
American working man did a third more work than any other average working
man in the world. It was the American ideal of work based on the Christian
theory of life that made us invincible in the past. Shall we give it up, "lean
on the shovel," and revert to the destructive theory of ancient paganism?

In the middle of the nineteenth century the notion that work is virtu-
ous was emphasized from the standpoint of aesthetics by Thomas Carlyle,
John Ruskin, William Morris, and others. They emphasized the element
of craftsmanship, holding that every man should spend part of each day
in manual labor and find some satisfaction in turning out a worth-while
piece of work. In our own day, writers on leisure have adopted this point
of view as a means of solving the problem of leisure rather than as a
justification of hard work.

It is quite obvious that hard manual work is in itself no virtue what-
ever. Productive work,, at the best, can only furnish us with the material
basis for truly human achievements on the supra-pig level. The less

806 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

time we have to devote to the problems of making a living, the more we
shall have to give to those things which make living worth while. Some
writers on leisure today have gone to the opposite extreme from the
attitude of Calvin, Franklin, and others, and have frankly and enthusi-
astically defended the virtues of freedom from drudgery. This point of
view has been forcefully expressed by Lawrence Conrad in an article on
"The Worthy Use of Leisure," in the Forum. Mr. Conrad points out that
our forebears struggled to conquer work and to gain freedom from
drudgery:

Our progenitors for thousands of years had yearned towards that moment
when we could have leisure. The leisure they pictured was not a turning from
band to gusset and from gusset to seam. It was unalloyed leisure, freedom from
compulsion. What they had in mind was a shedding of ball and chain; a libera-
tion of the fancy of humanity; a surging up of dreams and visions. They pic-
tured man, the conqueror, searching time and space for the signs of his further
destiny.11

But as we reach out to profit by the millenniums of toil of our ancestors
in the quest of freedom from drudgery, we are being captured by those
who hold that we shall be ruined unless our use of leisure is "worthy":

At just that moment another crowd came along and said: "Get up and get
busy. Did you think that you could be idle during this rest period? Not at
all. The factory is closed; we have let you out from there. But we have
work for you to do. You must take piano lessons, or start a stamp collection,
or read the book-of-the-month, or attend a lecture. This is for your own good."

So goes modern life. Our educational leaders would march us from the factory
to the public library, then on through the art museum and the lecture hall, and
on to our night school classes, and then home to our book-of-the-month. And
so to bed. So strong a prejudice has been aroused against standing still or sitting
still that we have all of us come to a place where we start guiltily when we are
discovered doing nothing. "What! No tools in your hands? You ought to be
ashamed!" And we are ashamed.

Lincoln, sitting on a cracker barrel in a country store, would be given some-
thing important to dp. Daydreaming has become a grievous sin. Dawdling,
which is one of the sweetest of all human pastimes, has been blotted out. You
never see a whittlcr in these days, just plain whittling.12

Mr. Conrad believes that the movement for "worthy" use of leisure is
robbing us of the enjoyment of our new found freedom from work:

As a people we grow disaffected and sour. Standing in front of the polar bear
cage for the hundredth time, or in front of the "Fifteenth Century Knight in
Armor," we turn the thing over in our minds. Somehow we have a feeling that,
left to ourselves, we could figure out a better way to spend our time.

Unless human beings can feel free to explore their leisure as individuals, each
one finding in it his own most gratifying compensation for a life of toil, then there
is no good in the fevered striving by which it was earned, and there is no use in
our trying to increase it for posterity.

No two of us would be quite alike in our taste for leisure. Each person would
have his own separate mode of vagrancy. Should each individual follow his own
bent and take his own special kind of reward for labor, our whole social order

11 November, 1931.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 807

might come to be sprinkled through once more with that most priceless element
the world has ever lost — namely, interesting human beings.18

One may not go quite as far as Mr. Conrad but his position illustrates
the change of attitude which has arisen in the present century. It is
certainly far sounder than the Calvinistic point of view and more in
harmony with the trends and requirements of our day. We shall con-
sider this problem of the ethics of leisure in the next section, dealing with
some leading social and psychological aspects of leisure in the machine
era.

Some Outstanding Social and Psychological Phases
of the Problem of Leisure

There is no dodging the immediate and vital significance of the problem
of leisure in the twentieth century. Before the problem can be attacked
in an intelligent fashion we must bring about such a reconstruction of
our economic society as will put an end to widespread unemployment and
idleness. Such work as needs to be done in a mechanical era must be
spread, so that everyone may do his share, however small the amount of
time involved in actual manual effort. Man is so constituted that he
likes to do some work and be self-supporting. Despite much banter to
the contrary, information collected on the attitudes of WPA and especially
CWA workers made it clear that they hated to be forced to dawdle along
and loaf on the job to spread work. They preferred to be "overworked"
in private industry. Social workers have also frequently reported on the
slow physical and mental degeneration of heads of families when forced
to remain idle on relief.

Yet, even if we do spread work and bring about other reforms so that
the full benefits of the machine will go to all, we shall still have the
problem of leisure to solve. Until we deal with it effectively, the un-
precedented amount of leisure time will, as Dr. L. P. Jacks points out,
only result in idleness, stagnation, and the decay of personality and
cultural life:

Men have always desired leisure. They are now threatened with more of it
than their education has fitted them for dealing with, more than nature intended
them to have, more than they are, as yet, capable of enjoying or making use
of. ...

The centre of our social problem is passing rapidly to the leisure end of life,
the end where consumption rather than production is the outstanding feature,
and it is precisely in regard to consumption that our lack of preparation for life,
or of education for it, is most pronounced. The applications of science are almost
entirely confined to the producing or working end of industry; our technological
and vocational systems of education have the same objective and the same appli-
cations; while the consuming process, especially that part of it which goes on at
the leisure end, is abandoned to caprice, to lawlessness, to the inroad of new
desires and fashions uncontrolled by any sort of scientific guidance.14

is Ibid.

14 The New York Times Magazine, July 5, 1931, p. 6.

808 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

As Dr. Jacks does well to emphasize, this problem of leisure is no
superficial fancy of the social dilettante, but a vital issue upon which the
very future of human civilization literally depends. Unless we work out
plans which bring the uses of leisure into harmony with the nature and
needs of man, the collapse of our culture is inevitable:

And the question immediately arises — perhaps the most serious question now
confronting our civilization — what are people in general going to do with leisure?
Will they take as the model for their leisure the sort of life now most favored by
the "idle rich" — for there are such people, though not all who receive the name
deserve it — and get as much of that sort of thing as their means enable them to
procure, display, luxurious feeding, sex excitement, gambling, bridge, golf, globe-
trotting and the rest; the life which gets itself portrayed in "magazines of fash-
ion" and furnishes not a few of our people with the only idea they have of
heaven? Or will they spend it in the way the idle poor, by whom I moan the
unemployed, are now spending the leisure forced on them by the industrial crisis,
which consists, for the most part, in just stagnating, physically, mentally and
morally? Or will it be a mixture of the two — stagnation relieved by whatever
doses of external excitement people may have the cash to purchase?

If the corning leisure of mankind is to be spent in any one of these ways, I
have no hesitation in predicting that our civilization will go to the devil and go
there, most probably, to the tune of revolution. Human beings are biologically
unfitted for a mode of existence framed on those lines and inevitably degenerate
and finally perish, by the process of revolutionary self-destruction, when they
adopt it.15

There are today in current discussion of the problems of leisure two
rather divergent attitudes toward the problem. One is the so-called
biological theory, which defends the position that a rational leisure must
be intimately 'associated with productive work, which is made pleasant
and rational. This attitude toward the problem is presented by Floyd
H. Allport, in an article, "This Coming Era of Leisure." 16 Professor All-
port thus expounds and defends his approach to the problem of leisure:

According to the first of these, which I shall call the biological theory, work
and play cannot be sharply separated. Leisure is not so much a time of freedom
from the tasks we have to do, but the lighter and more enjoyable aspects of those
tasks. Advocates of biological leisure are interested in increasing not the amount
of time in which our bodies shall be free from all productive labor, but rather the
enjoyment of productive activities themselves, once they are released from strain,
monotony, accident, and disease. Hence the advocate of biological leisure would
use machinery and applied science not primarily to replace human work, but to
render the organism as it performs its tasks more healthy and secure. He aims
for a wholesome balance between expenditure of energy and the variety, rest,
and recreation necessary to keep the organism fit. His goal is not more efficient
machinery, but more efficient men and women; and by this he means greater
efficiency not for their employers, but for themselves. . . .

Now it is the proposal of the technological leisurist to undermine all this
process of learning and acquiring interests by satisfying all organic needs in
advance and with only a minimum of routine action upon the part of the indi-
vidual. Such learning and work as will be required will be of a listless, stereo-
typed sort, unrelated to the biological structure or the emotional equipment of

™lbid. See also L. P. Jacks, "The Saving Forces of Our Civilization," in The
New York Times Magazine, November 8, 1931.
*6 Harper's, November, 1931.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 809

the worker. Work will require only the repetitive running of machines and not
the continuous and increasing development of bodily skills. Its pattern will be
laid down by another, not planned by ourselves. Except for the few contrivers
of remaining inventions, it will offer no stimulus of social recognition. There
will be little likelihood of developing the natural gifts which are peculiar to indi-
viduals; for a system which runs with perfect precision can be no respecter of
persons. Considered as a means of developing human potentialities, the life-
supporting work of the world will have to be written off as a total loss.

But worse than that, since work, through its connection with organic adjust-
ment, is the primary activity through which interest can be elicited, its separa-
tion from the rest of life would leave the organism listless and cold. It would
not merely destroy the possibility of special lines of interest, but would threaten
the experience of interest itself. The spoon-feeding sometimes practiced upon
children of wealthy parents would then be extended to humanity at large. We
should be like children for whom have been provided a corps of mechanical serv-
ants even more prompt and efficient than misguided parents; we should be in
danger of becoming a race of morons well fitted to enjoy the age of the perfect
labor-saving machine.

The goal of the elimination of labor or the separation of it from the so-called
higher activities, is, as a working philosophy, fundamentally wrong. Its fallacy
lies in the ignoring of human nature and the assumption that, by sheer inventive
genius, man can rise to heights in which he will be more than, or at least different
from, man. In conquering nature about us we are on the verge of denying
human nature.17

At the opposite extreme from this biological theory of work and leisure
presented by Professor Allport, we find the so-called technological or
sociological conception of leisure and its uses. According to this point of
view, work, in the sense of the drudgery necessary to produce the material
needs of mankind, is a necessary evil, a social nuisance which we should
get rid of so far as possible by utilizing machinery. This attitude has
been formulated by Henry Pratt Fairchild in an article, "Exit the Gospel
of Work." 18 Professor Fairchild calls attention to the tremendous trans-
formation in the status of work which has come about as a result of the
mechanical inventions of the last 50 years:

For about 999,950 years the chief preoccupation of man has been getting a
living. The bare task of keeping soul and body together, and providing himself
with a few simple comforts and an occasional modest luxury or two, has en-
grossed his entire time and energy. The one imperious demand that Nature
made of him was work. There was a direct and conspicuous relationship be-
tween the amount of work he did and his chance of survival, not to speak of any
positive enjoyment or contentment. Society needed the full output of produc-
tive energy of every one of its adult members, however unevenly the product
of that energy may have been distributed. Starvation was never far from the
lower classes, want from the middle groups, or privation from the privileged.
Famine was something more than a remote possibility. During this long period
the utility of work was so great that reverence for it became so thoroughly in-
grained in human nature as to seem almost instinctive, and social sanctions in
favor of work were developed of the most imperious character.

Now, within the last fifty years, man suddenly finds himself possessed of a
productive mechanism so capacious and competent that if he expend^ his habitual
amount of work on it it will swamp him with more goods than he has the ability

"Loc. cit., pp. 642-643, 64&-650,
i* Harper's, April, 1931,

610 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

to grapple with. No wonder many of his traditional values seem all awry! No
wonder he stands trembling, bemused, awestruck before his own devices, the wise
use of which defies his intelligence, the power of which far outstrips his ability
to control.10

This thoroughgoing revolution in the status and necessity of work
renders necessary and desirable a comparable alteration in our perspec-
tive toward work and leisure in the contemporary age:

What is needed is obviously a revolution in some of our basic philosophies of
life. First of all, as already intimated, we must have a complete reversal of our
characteristic attitude toward economic activities. The god of work must be
cast down from his ancient throne, and the divinity of enjoyment put in his place.
We must learn that consumption is the only justification and guide of production.
We must learn that consumption requires the same scientific study and research
that we have so generously lavished on production. We must develop a technic
of consumption. . . .

Along with this, we must have a new philosophy of work. Work must be
recognized not as a virtue or a blessing, but as an intrinsic evil. The only justifi-
cation for work is its product. . . .

We must, most emphatically of all, have a new philosophy of idleness — or
rather, we must substitute for the present philosophy of idleness a sound and
comprehensive philosophy of leisure time. We must come to realize that leisure
time, that is, time spent in pleasurable employment, is the only kind of time that
makes life worth living. All other time is tolerable only as it contributes to the
richness and developmental content of our leisure. But, of course, leisure, to be
itself tolerable, must be immeasurably more than mere idleness. Leisure time
should mean the opportunity for all those pursuits that really contribute to the
realization and enlargement of personality.20

The adoption of this attitude implies that all socially unnecessary work
should be dispensed with:

In the new day work must not only not be encouraged but not permitted unless
there is some positive and demonstrable social good to be derived from it. Work
is too potent a thing to be indulged in irresponsibly. We can't allow people to
go about working at their own sweet will. . . .

When mechanization has been carried to its ultimate perfection there will be so
little of routine production left for human hands and minds to do that in all prob-
ability there will be actual competition for the doing of it for its own sake, for
the interest, variety, and stimulation that it has to offer.21

If such changes are brought into being, our leisure will no longer be
contaminated by any hangover of the punitive philosophy that stresses
the nobility of drudgery. Our time will veritably be free for creative
endeavor on the supra-pig level of achievement:

Thus the distinction between work and recreation will at last be wiped out
altogether. Everyone will be left free for genuinely creative activities. Type
will still be set, clothes made, furniture built, gardens planted, and ditches dug
by hand. But these things will be done in just the same spirit as now pictures
are painted, songs sung, and doilies embroidered — for the delight and pleasure in
doing them, for the expression and development of personality. Few enjoyments
are higher than those which come from impressing one's own individuality upon

19 Fairchild, loc. rit., p. 567.

20 Ibid., pp. 570, 571-572.

., pp. 571, 573,

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 811

a material medium, especially if it be in measurably permanent form. Mankind
is endowed with limitless capacities for creating beautiful and useful things in
varied and individual forms. The men of the future — and not such a distant
future, either — will devote themselves to these and kindred pursuits, and will look
back upon their ancestors who spent their time and energy in the routine pro-
duction of standardized, conventional, and largely superfluous material objects in
much the same attitude with which we regard the savages who knock out their
teeth, brand their skin, or cut off the joints of their fingers for some traditional
reason that they do not even think of trying to understand, but just blindly
obey.22

Dr. Jacks suggests an approach to the problem of leisure which seeks
to effect a compromise between the interpretations offered by Professors
Allport and Fairchild:

Man is a skill-hungry animal, hungry for skill in his body, hungry fqr skill in
his mind, and never satisfied until that skill-hunger is appeased. After all, what
a discontented miserable animal man is until he gets some kind of satisfaction for
this skill-hunger that is in him! Self-activity in skill and creation is the sum-
mary mark of human nature from childhood right on up until man's arteries
begin to ossify.23

If our solution of the problem of leisure is to be successful and a real
asset to man and society, its exploitation must fully satisfy the basic
human drive for creative activity:

The happiness that man's nature demands and craves for is impossible until
the creative part of him is awakened, until his skill-hunger is satisfied. Man's
happiness, the happiness for which he was created, comes from within himself.
Till then, and till his happiness begins to well up from within through this self-
active, creative life, man is living on a starvation diet; he is devitalized; he is in
low condition; he is wanting in mind and body. Created for the enjoyment of
happiness,' yes, but on those terms no amount of ready-made pleasures purchased
pn the market, no intensity of external excitement, will ever compensate for the
loss of creative impulse, or for the starvation of his essential nature as a skill-
hungry being. That is a fundamental truth, and to me there is no truth about
human nature that I find more certain, more important, more vital, whenever
the education of human beings, either of children or adults, is in question.24

In an illuminating article on 'The Problems of Leisure," 25 George A.
Lundberg suggests that it is high time that the social sciences began to
devote attention to the problems and activities of leisure. Play and
various types of art must occupy our attention in periods of leisure, now
that work is becoming increasingly unnecessary during a considerable
period of time each day. Play and art can both take care of our leisure
time needs and satisfy that craving for skill-expression which Dr, Jacks
has correctly emphasized:

The social sciences are devoted to the study of group behaviour — what people
do. Now it happens that among the various activities in which man engages —
political, economic, etc. — are certain activities which we call play, recreation,

22 Ibid., p. 573.

23 L. P. Jacks, Today's Unemployment and Tomorrow's Leisure (reprinted from
Recreation, December, 1931), p. 6.

24 Ibid.

25 Sociology and Social Research, May-June, 1933.

812 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

artistic, or more generally, "leisure" pursuits. These activities are present as
universally, have as long a history, and presumably have behind them as deep-
seated biological drives as any of the others. All behaviour is the result of the
organism struggling to make an adjustment of some sort. Play, painting, danc-
ing, and singing are basically just as truly responses to organic needs as are
hunting, farming, or withdrawing one's hand from the fire. From this point of
view, play and artistic behaviour are as proper subject matter for scientific study
as any other phases of human activity.26

In the civilization which lies ahead of us, which is bound to be charac-
terized by both greater leisure and a more secular point of view, aesthetics
may become the chief objective of human life, as theology was in the
Middle Ages. We shall be concerned primarily with becoming Jiappy
here and now, rather than saving our souls in a future life:

There is no reason, therefore, why man in a social order less preoccupied than
the present with the maldistribution of wealth, should not turn his intellectual
activities upon, say, aesthetics, just as under other conditions he has turned them
on theology. The starting points and sequences of modern science have had, and
still have, their justification. But other equally valid thought-patterns might
conceivably be constructed from other starting points with other sequences in
other directions. . . .

It is conceivable that under another system of ideals and education men might
prefer to utilize at least part of the leisure which the machine has won for them
in some form of self-activity which would not greatly affect economic production
of profits. We might, for example, hold up what men are rather than what they
buy as a standard of worth. On this theory the greatest satisfactions of life as
well as the best balanced personalities come from the acquisition and exercise of
skills of various sorts not necessarily of economic significance. The consumption
of blue sky, sunshine, and sylvan solitude, or the amateur dabbling in the fine
arts is of this nature. Merely as a method of killing time and consuming ener-
gies it may be no more absorbing than the frantic game of keeping up with the
Joneses. The justification for this substitute, therefore, must be based on other
grounds. We must show that this substitute is in some way more compatible
with man's biological nature and that its indulgence contributes more to that
balance and integration of personality which is generally recognized as desirable
— the opposite of the enormous numbers of mental cases in and out of our
asylums.27

Leisure and Recreation

We have already suggested that play and the arts will have to provide
for most of our activity in the future. We have seen that Professor All-
port and those who hold to the biological theory of leisure contend that,
work and play should remain closely interrelated. There is something
to be said for this point of view, especially along the line of making
necessary work more pleasant to human beings and less disastrous in its
effect on the human personality. But the period in which we can work
at all is bound to become shorter and shorter. So, even the most pleasur-
able work cannot occupy much of our time. The problem of leisure

28 Loc. cit., p. 5.
27Lundberg, "T
573-574; and Leisure: A Suburban Study, Columbia University Press, 1934, Chap!

27Lundberg, "Training Jor Leisure," Teacher's College Record, April, 1933, pp.

i. I.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 813

would still remain. And, certainly little can be said for the theory,
popular in some quarters, that play should be made laborious. As Pro-
fessor Lundberg has suggested, the very idea of slavish pleasures is a
misnomer. Even though the populace should take a far greater interest
in artistic activity than it does today, we are bound to have more and
more time which we must devote to some form of playful activity.
Hence the problem of play and recreation is a significant one.

Perhaps as good a definition of play as any is offered by S. L. Pressy,
namely, that play is "those things which individuals do simply because
they want to." This view of play harmonizes with both the older notion
that play is simply a natural form of human expression and the newer
attempts to find a definite psychological explanation of play and its
personal and social functions.

During the nineteenth century, various sociologists, psychologists, and
educators brought forward scientific theories of play. These have been
summarized by Edward S. Robinson.28 The sociologist, Herbert Spencer,
held that play is a form of activity which results from the necessity of
discharging surplus nervous energy. He also suggested that imitation
has a large function in playful activities, a notion which was more elabo-
rately developed by the French writer Gabriel Tarde. The psychologist,
Moritz Lazarus, suggested a theory of play which has received wide
acceptance. He was father of the notion that play constitutes a funda-
mental form of recreation for the human being. It provides the natural
recovery from over-activity and fatigue. It is truly recreative, in that
it provides an alternative form of activity which is more stimulating than
sheer rest and immobility.

Another psychologist, Karl Groos, who made elaborate studies of the
play of both animals and men, offered a sociological and pedagogical
conception of play. He held that play is fundamentally a preparation
for adult life, in which the natural instincts in man are socialized in such
a fashion as to be adapted to the requirements of the life of an adult in
a social group. He also emphasized the cathartic function of play,
namely, that play permits us to work off pent-up emotions and surplus
energy. Lilla Appleton, after making a study of play among both
savages and civilized mankind, maintained that the forms of play have a
definite physical basis, associated with somatic changes related to the
growth of the individual.

The eminent educator and psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, adapted his
notion of play to his general theory of psychological recapitulation. He
held, in general, that the mental life of the individual reproduces in brief
the mental history of the race. Accordingly, he looked upon play as a
persistence of the motor habits and mental traits of the human race as
they had existed in the past. Play is, fundamentally, a reversion to the
activities of our ancestors, running back into the animal world. Hall's
disciple, George T. W. Patrick, in his Psychology of Relaxation, gave

28 Article "Play," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 12.

814 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

this idea greater precision by holding that modern man's impulse to
recreation is an attempt to recall and reproduce the chief types of life,
habits, and occupations during the long period of stone-age culture. The
psychologist, Alexander Shand, presented an emotional theory of play.
He held that play is basically devoted to the maintenance of the emotion
of joy. His doctrine was thus a hedonistic interpretation of play. The
English psychologist, William McDougall, contended that play arises
out of the natural impulse of rivalry. It is produced by the effort to
surpass others.

Freud and the psychoanalysts have laid much stress upon the make-
believe element in play. It is a manifestation of fantasy and a form
of substitution in human activity. Alfred Adler relates play to his theory
of the neurotic constitution by contending that play is the child's com-
pensation for his physical and mental inadequacy.

These theories of play are not mutually exclusive. All of them
make a valuable contribution to a comprehensive interpretation of the
psychology of play and its function in society, such as that presented by
Professor Pressey in the following paragraph:

It is presupposed, in the first place, that the individual is naturally active,
physically and mentally. In considering play, the question is therefore not as
to why the individual does' anything, but as to why he indulges in the particular
activities called play. The following factors seem outstanding: (a) Play varies
with the physical and mental development of the individual. There is a gradual
development from the more simple and tactive to the< more complex and social,
and the play of an individual at any particular age is in harmony with the stage
of development he has reached, (b) Play varies with the physical environment
and opportunity for play ; play is activity which is in accordance in one way or
another with the child's physical environment. Finally, (c) fads, fashions and
conventions as to play, among both children and adults, are exceedingly impor-
tant influences; play is activity which is in harmony, in one way or another, with
the individual's social environment.29

From a sociological point of view, the most fundamental contributions
of play are those which fall under the educational and hygienic aspects.
In an educational way, play helps to socialize the individual. Especially
is this true of play carried on in groups. The natural and selfish impulses
of the individual are modified and held in check by the social restraints
imposed by the rules of the game. Not only rivalry, but the sense of
fair play, is brought into being. It is no accident that educational
sociologists have laid great stress upon the importance of play in prepar-
ing youth for intelligent participation in the responsibilities of group life.
The enthusiasm shown by children and adults in play has had an im-
portant influence upon educational theory. Observers could not help
marking the vast difference between the gusto exhibited £n play and the
indifference manifested by the child in schools conducted according to
the traditional type of punitive discipline. Hence there has been an
effort on the part of progressive educators to devise new types of educa-

29 S. L. Pressey, Psychology and the New Education, Harper's, 1933, p. 79.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 815

tional procedure which seek to produce in the child the same enthusiasm
for learning* that he manifests on the playground. To a certain extent,
the more progressive educators have sought to make the learning process
a form of playful activity. The Progressive Education Movement, in
particular, has endeavored to introduce into the schoolroom some of the
motivation which influences children in spontaneous play.

The hygienic aspects of play have been recognized by those interested
in both physical and mental hygiene. The recreational and restful
features of play, through introducing alternate forms of activity, have
been thoroughly accepted in modern physical hygiene. Gymnastic ex-
ercises and supervised games have been provided to help build up the
physique of youth, special forms being devised to correct physical de-
ficiencies. The stimulating, distracting, and compensatory mental
phases of play have been taken into account by students of mental
hygiene. The latter have stressed the cathartic and curative aspects of
playful endeavor. These are extremely helpful to the adult as well as
to the child: Today, play occupies an important place in educational
theory and mental hygiene, as well as in the field of recreational endeavor.

Outstanding Phases of the History of Recreation

Until the rise of modern democracy and the Industrial Revolution, play
and sports were chiefly a privilege and activity of the upper classes.
The hard working and oppressed peasants, serfs, and slaves had little
time or energy for play, even when legally permitted to indulge in it.
The spprts of the upper classes were long closely associated with religious
rites or with the preparation for war. The Roman chariot races, the
tournaments, jousts, and hunting parties of the Middle Ages, and the
fox hunting of the English gentry in modern times are good illustrations
of the typical noble monopoly of prevailing sports. But the yeoman and
middle classes were not entirely deprived of popular sports. For example,
in the Middle Ages, they indulged in archery, quoits, bear-baiting, cock-
fighting, mock tournaments, and the like.

Some historians of sport have contended that this social cleavage in
the sport world between the nobility and the yeomen was what has given
rise in our day to the differentiation between the amateur and the pro-
fessional. Our modern amateur has descended from the earlier aristo-
crat, and our present professional from those of the middle and lower
classes, whose sporting activities were looked upon as a lower type and
were sometimes entered upon for self-support. The invention of
machines during the Industrial Revolution ultimately provided leisure
time for the masses to indulge in sports — iron slaves being substituted
for human slaves and serfs. The democratic theory of human equality
emphasized the right of all to participate in play and sport, thus breaking
down the earlier doctrines of aristocratic monopoly. A special impetus
was given to the democratization of sports by the first World War.
Examination of recruits revealed the startling presence of physical de-

816 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

fects on a national scale and suggested that mass sports might help to
correct these. The cultivation of mass sports as a means o'f promoting
physical perfection in preparation for war gained particular headway in
Fascist countries. But the crowding of industrial populations in con-
gested city areas gravely handicapped the direct participation of the
masses in sports; they have usually had to be content to indulge vi-
cariously in the role of spectators.

In primitive and early historic society, play and sports were closely
linked up with religion. Religious festivals, especially those associated
with fertility rites, were accompanied by various forms of play and
games, some of which took a form which today would be regarded as
licentious. In ancient Oriental society there was a particularly close
relationship between religious festivals and such play as existed. The
relation between Greek play and Greek religion has been described by
Jane Harrison in her interesting book Ancient Art and Ritual. Other
religious celebrations which promoted play, sports, and games were those
which celebrated a military victory or a deliverance from pestilence or
some other form of disaster. The close interrelation between religion,
sex, and sports continued well into the Middle Ages. As Albert Parry
points out: "Not infrequently during the Middle Ages, races in honor of
a saint were followed by general licentiousness among the spectators." 80
Another association of play and sports with religion in primitive and
early historic society was manifested by the close relationship between
tricks and religious ceremonials. Such tricks as the tying and untying
of knots, ventriloquism, and numerous fire tricks were performed in re-
ligious ceremonials. They were closely associated with magic. In
initiation rites, a great variety of tricks were devised to deceive and
impress the uninitiated. While play has been sweepingly secularized in
modern times, it is still widely associated with religious auspices and
organizations. The Y.M.C.A., the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.H.A.,
and the like, have laid much stress upon gymnasiums, games, and physical
exercise. Sunday-school picnics are usually given over to various forms
of games, thus perpetuating in a lesser degree the association between
play and religion in early society.

The history of play, sports, and recreation, like the history of most
other forms of culture, is in one way a record of its progressive seculariza-
tion. While religion still played a large part in Greek recreation, espe-
cially in the games associated with religious festivals, the Greeks were
the first to give a marked secular turn to recreation and physical exercise.
The Greeks regarded athletics as decisively a phase of leisure-time ac-
tivity executed on the supra-pig level of achievement. The Greeks
looked upon recreation as a phase of both hygiene and aesthetics. From
the standpoint of hygiene, the Greeks jegarded physical exercise and
games as a means of producing the perfect human body* Moreover, the
Greeks viewed athletic games as a form of aesthetic expression, and

80 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Vol. 14, p. 306.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 817

athletics were closely associated with music in the Greek classification of
the arts.

The Romans continued the process of secularizing sports and games.
The Romans, however, were interested in producing a good physique and
in encouraging games and sports primarily for the purpose of preparing
the Roman youth, physically and mentally, for war. Roman politics
also contributed a secularizing influence, since the government tried to
placate the masses by providing great public spectacles, such as chariot
races and gladiatorial combats. These Roman spectacles represented
perhaps the first impressive example of the vicarious participation of the
masses in public sports as spectators.

Since the nobility monopolized most sports during the Middle Ages
and, since their sports were of a primarily military character, 'the secu-
larizing influence was continued. But there was also a strong religious
element in medieval sports and recreation. Medieval sports were chiefly
military or quasi-military and designed to train brave and hardy knights.
But the supreme purpose of battle was to promote the cause of Christ.
As Charles Young puts it: "The medieval knight employed his over-
weening sentiment of personal independence and love of adventure in
defense of the Church. To fight for Christ becomes not merely the
highest duty but the noblest ambition of one who traditionally regards
courage in battle as the sum of all virtue." With the growing seculariza-
tion of life since the Middle Ages, sports naturally tended to share in the
process. The final secularization of sports and recreation was accom-
plished as a phase of the commercialization of sport in the late nineteenth
and the twentieth centuries.

Among primitive peoples we find many examples of games and sports,
some closely related to the responsibilities of daily life, such sts hunting.
Much attention was given to archery, when primitive peoples had
mastered the use of the bow and arrow. Blow guns were frequently used.
There were games consisting of rolling rings with spears. A variety of
string games were common. The Indians also had ball games, and some
historians of sport derive the American baseball game from a sport
originally common among the American Indians. It is certain that the
Canadian gajne of lacrosse was directly taken over from one of the
Indian ball games. We have already referred to the various games and
tricks associated with religious ceremonials and magic in primitive times.
The children among primitive peoples indulged in games not so far re-
moved from those common among children today. They had numerous
toys, such as miniature boats, sledges, reindeer, and other animals. They
indulged in the common make-believe play and mimicry, such as playing
at fighting and hunting, playing house, playing chief, and the like. As in
modern society, much of the play of primitive children was in anticipation
of, and preparation for, the responsibilities of adult life.

The games and sports of early historic peoples may be illustrated by
the example of the ancient Egyptians. One of the favorite sports among
the Egyptian aristocracy was bullfighting, but it was a contest between

818 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

bulls themselves, and not one between bulls and men. Acrobatic feats
and games were very popular with the Egyptians. Other common Egyp-
tian games and sports were throwing knives at a target, rolling and
catching hoops, wrestling, and many games with bones, nuts, beans, and
shells. Then ball games were confined primarily to throwing and catch-
ing. Boxing was little indulged in by the Egyptians, but mock fights
with staves were popular. The honorable place of woman in ancient
Egyptian civilization was reflected in the fact that women participated
prominently in most of the Egyptian sports, actually predominating in
ball games. Sports which strengthened the physique and prepared youth
for military activities were especially popular in Assyria and Persia.
Horseback riding and hunting were encouraged. The kings and nobility
showed special enthusiasm for big-game hunting and stories of royal
prowess in killing lions are fabulous.

No people developed sports in a more wholehearted fashion than did
the ancient Greeks. Among the Greeks, play and recreation was not a
mere informal and sporadic thing, but an integral part of Greek educa-
tion, citizenship, and cultural life. The Greeks made thorough provision
for compulsory physical training, both during school days and in early
adulthood. They encouraged the cultivation of physical sports through-
out life. The Greeks had the palaistra and the gymnasium (from which
we derive the term gymnastics) , in which to give systematic instruction in
physical exercises, and various gymnastic equipment, such as weights,
punchballs, dumbbells,, boxing gloves, discuses, javelins, and the like.
Several types of ball games were played. Wrestling, boxing, running
races, jumping, throwing of weights, discuses, javelins, and the like were
popular forms of physical exercise and sports. Boxing was a particularly
brutal and dangerous sport, since the gloves were merely strips of leather
wound around the hands, and the Greeks directed their blows almost ex-
clusively at the head. Professional boxers had strips of iron , under the
bands of leather. The fingers were left free and it was not unknown for
opponents to have their eyes gouged out. We should not, of course, fail
to mention the famous Olympic games held every four years, which con-
stituted one of the most impressive spectacles of ancient Greek life.

In addition to the games and sports involved in Greek physical edu-
cation and associated with formal athletics, the Greeks indulged in vari-
ous informal sports. One of the most popular among the aristocracy was
horseback riding. Hunting, swimming, and rowing were popular Greek
sports, but the Greeks never went in for bathing as extensively as did the
Romans. The Greek children played with hoops, tops, kites, swings, and
the like. Knuckle bones provided a form of practical entertainment
among the Greek youngsters in helping to teach arithmetic. All in all,
one may safely say that the Greek attitude toward athletics and sports,
in offering training to all in good sportsmanship and symmetrical physical
development, came closer than any other recreational notion in history
to, the ideal which \ye might well seek to recover and apply in our present
day efforts to solve the problem of leisure.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 819

Though the Romans adopted many phases of Greek culture, they did
not take over to any marked degree the aesthetic attitude of the Greeks
toward sports. While they provided for intensive and systematic physi-
cal training of Roman youth, this was carried on primarily as a phase of
military training, or at least for the purpose of promoting military effi-
ciency. As Charles V. P. Young puts it: "While the Romans were
intensely fond of physical exercise, it was originally and primarily, as
has been said, as a means to an end, viz., military efficiency. The scien-
tific training of an ideal harmony of mind and body had no place in their
scheme of things."31

Roman boys were compelled to assemble daily to be put through
arduous physical exercises and training in the use of weapons. They
were drilled in the military step, compelled to carry heavy weights, trained
to throw the javelin, and the like. Accessory exercises designed to im-
prove physical and military efficiency were such things as boxing, wrest-
ling, and running. These exercises were serious and solemn matters,
rarely taking the form of spontaneous sports or social amusements.
Roman men, even prominent public officials, did, however, take a rather
unusual interest in certain gymnastics and games for the sake of relaxa-
tion and recreation. Boys also participated in these games when they
were not occupied in more serious exercises. Ball games were particularly
popular with the Romans. Some of these games resembled our modern
baseball, and others were roughly like soccer and medicine ball, as played
today. The Romans also showed much enthusiasm for sham fights in
which they fought a dummy much as they would a living adversary. It
hardly needs to be pointed out that no other people in history have shown
as much enthusiasm for public baths as did the Romans. The opening
of the baths was announced each day by the ringing of a bell. The great
baths were capacious and luxurious. There were rooms and pools for
hot, warm, and cold-water bathing. Gymnasiums and ball courts were
provided for the more energetic. There were balconies on which bathers
of both sexes might gather and gossip. Libraries and art galleries were
often provided for the more studious and aesthetic. The price of admis-
sion was very low — about one cent for a man, two cents for a woman, and
free admission for children.

We have already called attention to the fact that the Romans were the
first to promote mass attendance at sports, as a phase of their political
policy of bread-and-circuses. Gladiatorial fights, conflicts between
gladiators and wild beasts, fights between beasts themselves, and chariot
races were the more important offerings in these great public spectacles.
Associated with the chariot races was the prototype of our race track
gambling, racketeering, and fixing of races. The Romans were, inci-
dentally, much given to gambling and games of chance. The Roman
amphitheaters in which these public spectacles were held provided a
seating capacity equal to that of our largest stadiums today. Indeed,

81 C. V. P. Young, How Men Have Lived, Stratford, 1931, p. 163.

820 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

few of our present stadiums equal the seating capacity of the Circus
Maximus, which seated more than 150,000 spectators.

During the Middle Ages, there was, as we have seen, a definite social
cleavage in the realm of play and sports. The nobility, whose life was
colored by the ideals of the age of chivalry, followed sports supposedly
suitable to the noble life. Some of these noble sports, such as the tourna-
ment and the joust, constituted training in the art of war in the age of
knighthood and chivalry. The tournament was a real battle between
mounted knights, which took on the form of a great public spectacle.
Deaths were frequent. The church often protested because of the num-
ber killed or injured at tournaments. Jousting was somewhat less
dangerous, since the combatants were separated by a wooden beam
which prevented the horses from colliding when the knights rode head-
long at each other. Less dangerous still were the quintain, in which a
knight endeavored to pierce a manikin with his lance at full speed, and
the behourd which was a type of fencing on horseback.

Aside from these military sports, the most popular type of noble recrea-
tion was some form of hunting. The nobles had exclusive hunting rights
in the Middle Ages and little thought of the ruinous effect of their hunting
on the cultivated fields of the peasants. Stag hunting and wild boar
hunting were popular. Almost universal was the sport of falconry, or
hunting birds and small game animals with trained falcons and hawks.
When inside their castles the nobility amused themselves chiefly by
listening to the songs and jokes of the troubadours and jesters, playing
chess and drinking.

The medieval yeomanry had their own sports, some of which were an
imitation of those of the nobles. Such were the mock tournaments, in
which the yeomen were seated on oxen and armed with flails instead of
lances. The yeomen also frequently had their own quintains, in the form
of spearing figures mounted on posts in the village common. Instead of
the noble hunting enterprises, the yeomen had to content themselves with
archery, pitching quoits, bear-baiting, cockfighting, and the like. The
peasants and sejfs had fewer sports than the yeomen, but on manorial
'holidays they might have a chance to wrestle, throw weights, watch a
cockfight, or observe two blindfolded men trying to kill with a club a
pig or a goose let loose in an enclosure. Usually, the peasants and serfs,
working from daylight until dark, had little time or inclination to engage
in sports.

The rise of Protestantism, and especially of Puritanism, in early
modern times, tended to exert a restraining influence upon sports. The
main leisure possessed by any, save the nobility, was on Sunday, and the
Puritans revived the Sabbatarian teachings of the Old Testament and
attempted to enforce a taboo upon sports on Sunday. This definitely
curtailed sports and amusements in those places where the Puritans were
able to enact and enforce their restrictive legislation. Moreover, the
Puritans looked askance upon bear and bull-baiting, cockfighting, and
the like, and did their best to discourage these, even when carried on

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 821

during week days. Thus, while religion had formerly stimulated play
and sports, it became, for a long time, a distinctly restraining influence in
many Protestant countries.

With the invention of gunpowder, knighthood and chivalry came to an
end, and the typical medieval amusements of the feudal nobility were
terminated when this social class was finally ousted from power. Tour-
naments, jousts, and falconry were discarded. The commoner was
gradually allowed to participate in hunting activities. But horseback
riding still remained the basis of the sport of the upper classes which>
particularly in England, was transformed into hunting with the hounds.

With the termination of feudalism, the middle class rose in importance
and their sports assumed a social importance quite equal to those of the
country gentry. Typical forms of play and sport in early modern times
are summarized in the following statement from an English newspaper
of the early eighteenth century:

The modern sports of the citizens, besides drinking, are eockfighting, bowling
upon greens, playing at tables or backgammon, cards, dice, and billiards; also
musical meetings in the evening ; they sometimes ride out on horseback, and hunt
with the lord-mayor's pack of dogs when the common hunt goes on. The lower
classes divert themselves at football, wrestling, cudgels, ninepins, shovelboard,
cricket, stowball, ringing of bells, quoits, pitching the bar, bull and bear bait-
ings.82

Other sports mentioned by another writer of the same era were "Sail-
ing, rowing, swimming, archery, bowling in alleys, and skittles, tennis,
chess, and draughts ; and in the winter skating, sliding, and shooting."

We should also in this place say a word or two about the sports of our
colonial ancestors during this period. The typical sports of the English
country gentry were brought over and established in the southern colonies.
Pox hunting behind the hounds was particularly popular with the squires
of Virginia and some other southern colonies. The upper classes in both
the South and the North found much pleasure in boating and yacht races.
Horse racing was popular in Virginia, and it made some headway even
in New England. Hunting and fishing were not only popular but a prac-
tical necessity throughout the whole colonial area. The middle and lower
classes amused themselves at such games as skittles, an early form of
bowling, pulling the goose,33 cockfighting, swimming, and skating. Due
to the popularity of hunting and the necessity of protecting themselves
from the Indians, the colonists universally fostered shooting matches.
In the rough life of the frontier vigorous sports such as rough-and-tumble
fights, wrestling matches, and eyegouging were popular.

The nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable change in the range
and character of sports and recreation. This revolution was brought
about by the sweeping mechanical and institutional changes which have

82 Young, op. cit.t p. 273.

88 In this sport a neavily greased goose was hung on a rope above a road or a
stream and a man on horseback or in a boat rode under the goose at full speed
and tried to pull it off the rope.

822 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

come over the world since 1800. The Industrial Revolution, the inven-
tion of machines, and the triumph of modern industrialism gradually
brought about a greater amount of leisure time which could be devoted
to sports and recreation. But most of those who were able to enjoy this
larger volume of leisure found themselves cooped up in cities, where the
facilities for recreation were very limited. This encouraged the creation
of mass spectacles and commercial recreation, in which the professional
and working classes could participate vicariously as spectators. The
growth of democracy, which followed in the wake of the increasing
strength of the working classes, swept away most of the exclusiveness
which had dominated sports. Sports became the legal right of every-
body, even though the masses might have a limited opportunity to engage
in such recreation. Nationalism also exerted its influence upon the world
of sports. The German patriot, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, introduced the
idea of practicing gymnastics as a phase of the preparation of the Ger-
mans for successful resistance to Napoleon. His introduction of gym-
nastic exercises in Berlin, in 1811, was widely imitated throughout the
rest of Prussia and in some of the other German states. The German
Turnvereine of the nineteenth century were definitely modeled on the
program of "Father" Jahn.

Another important innovation in sports since the opening of the nine-
teenth century has been the growing popularity of competitive games and
the development of organized games between matched teams. The latter
seems to have been, in the beginning, primarily an English and American
development. This new phase of sports may have been due in part to
environmental conditions peculiar to the English and Americans, but
very likely it also reflected the competitive character of the economic life
and institutions of our capitalistic industrialism. Anyhow, it has been
one of the most momentous innovations in the history of sports and
recreation. Its significance and foundations are thus characterized by
S. L. Pressey:

Certain larger social influences upon play also deserve mention. The organ-
ized team game seems to be largely an Anglo-Saxon product. American col-
legians prefer football, whereas the youthful intelligentsia of Germany have a
special fondness for dueling, and the French prefer tennis to play between groups.
But all this is presumably not because German or French youths lack some
mysterious instinct or ability which tends to make English and American boys pe-
culiarly fond of team games. Rather the explanation is to be found in differences
in climate, in the size and character of the leisure class, and especially in the
largely unknown development of the conventions of amusement. It must be
further observed that these differences are being rapidly modified. The vogue
of tennis in France is relatively new, although the game originated there. Amer-
ican baseball has no very long history, and its amazing popularity in Japan has
come about in a short period of time. The present passion for golf in our coun-
try is largely a post-war phenomenon. In short, there is every evidence that the
form which the play life of a community or a nation takes is determined by
influences which are best described as social; certain conventions are developed
with respect to sport and amusement.

The writer is inclined to believe that the competitive character of much Amer-
ican play is to be regarded as such a convention. After all, many recreational

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 823

activities, such as fishing, canoeing, hiking, dancing, and singing, are not com-
petitive. The tendency to identify play with competitive games and sports may
be a product of our highly individualistic and competitive socio-economic mode
of life. The present emphasis on the competitive in recreation seems to be
relatively recent, and, on the whole, unfortunate.84

We may now briefly describe the origins of characteristic sports of the
nineteenth century, which have been based upon the principle of matched
teams and have lent themselves particularly well to the creation of mass
spectacles and commercialized recreation. Baseball has gained such pop-
ularity that it is usually described as our "national game." Some attrib-
ute its origins to the ball games common among the American Indians.
But it is more likely that it is a further development of the numerous ball
games which were common among the English people in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The literal origin of our present baseball game
can be traced back to the ingenuity of Abner Doubleday, a civil engi-
neer, who laid out the modern baseball diamond and introduced on it the
game of town ball in Cooperstown, N. Y., in 1839. The Doubleday
system was popularized when the Knickerbocker baseball club was organ-
ized in New York City, in 1845, under the leadership of Alexander J.
Cartwright. This took over the Doubleday system and provided for a
team of nine men. In the decade of the fifties, baseball teams were
formed in the other larger cities of the East and the game was thoroughly
launched. The first professional club to be established was the Cincin-
nati Red Stockings, who assumed a professional status in 1869. The
game was nationalized when the National League was founded in New
York City, in February, 1876. The American League was founded in
1900. Numerous minor leagues have also been created. The develop-
ment of stars, since the advent of Adrian C. ("Cap") Anson in 1877 has
served to add glamour and popularity.

Football is an old game, which certainly goes back as far as ancient
Sparta. It was very popular in medieval England. Early American
football was modeled after the English game, particularly as developed
at Rugby. It was played in Eastern universities with indifferent results
during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. But the American
football game, as a conflict of regular matched teams, was launched
with the formation of the Oneida Football Club in Boston, in 1867. The
guiding spirit was Gerrit Smith Miller, a native of New York State. The
first inter-collegiate contest was played between Rutgers and Princeton
in 1869, with 25 players on each side. The man who was mainly respon-
sible for transforming football from its early crude manifestations in the
'60's into the present well-developed inter-collegiate and professional
game was Walter C. Camp, a member of the Yale football team in the
late seventies, and the leading adviser in all modifications of the rules
of the game for nearly 50 years thereafter. Famous coaches who have
helped to develop and stabilize the game have been Amos Alonzo Stagg

34 Presgey, Psychology and, the Ne^-Educati'On, Harper's,. 1933, pp. 74-75.

824 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

of Chicago, Fielding H. Yost of Michigan, Percy Haughton of Harvard,
and Glen Warner of the Carlisle Indians.

The increasingly popular game of basketball was created in January,
1892, by James Naismith of the Y.M.C.A. Training College at Spring-
field, Mass. It grew out of an attempt to adapt the principles of lacrosse
and association football to indoor play on gymnasium floors. Professor
Naismith organized the first team at Springfield and the game rapidly
gained popularity. Adopted as an amateur game by the colleges and uni-
versities in the nineties, professional teams became popular early in the
present century. The game has enormously increased its following in
the last decade.

Hockey, as a popular game, followed on the heels of basketball. The
game of "shinny" had been played since colonial times, but ice hockey
as an organized game was imported from Canada, where it was already
popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was introduced
into the United States by a Canadian student at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, in 1895. Its popularity spread quickly, and during the next year
the American Amateur Hockey League was formed. While hockey has
been popular as an inter-collegiate game, it has gained even greater head-
way among professionals during the last 15 years. During the winter
months it is probably more widely supported than any other professional
sport, gathering together great crowds of spectators in the numerous
arenas provided for it in American cities.

We should, perhaps, mention certain other games and sports which have
come to enjoy much popularity. Perhaps the most notable innovation
has been the game of golf. The game was played in Scotland as far
back as the sixteenth century. It became known, but was not popular, in
the English colonies of America in the eighteenth century. The game
was revived in the United States as a result of the influence of Robert
Lockhart, a resident of Yonkers, N. Y., who had been born in Scotland.
Enthused over golf as a result of a visit to his native land in 1888, he
returned to Yonkers and enlisted the interest of his friend, John Reid,
who became the first great American patron of golf. The first outstand-
ing American golfer was Walter J. Travis, who won a national amateur
title in 1900. Others who gained eminence were Jerome B. Travers,
Harry H. Hilton, Francis Oumiet, Walter C. Hagen, Robert T. Jones, Jr.,
Gene Sarazen, and R. Guldahl. The game has been cultivated by both
amateurs and professionals. One of the ablest of the latter was "Long
Jim" (James) Barnes. While golf was widely established before the first
World War, its popularization has come chiefly since 1918. Between
1916 and 1930 the number of golf courses increased from 742 to 5,856.
The golf equipment manufactured in 1929 was valued at 21 million dol-
lars, and the present value of golf courses in the United States has been
estimated at over a billion dollars.

An interesting development in contemporary sport has been the revival
of the principles of the ancient Olympic games. This was a reaction
against the growing professionalism and commercialism of sports. The

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 825

development was also due to the personal enthusiasm of a Frenchman,
Pierre de Couvertin, who sought compensation for the defeat of France
in 1870 by carrying on propaganda for out-of-door sports. He thought
that France might triumph here, though defeated on the field of battle.
He summoned a conference in Paris, in 1864, at which the International
Olympic Committee was created. The first Olympic games were held in
1896 at Olympia in Greece. Taking the form of a great international
competition in the realm of sport, the Olympic games have been held
every four years since 1896,84a constantly gaining in popularity, and pres-
tige. The competition has been rendered more keen and severe by the
growth of nationalism since the first World War, and particularly since
the rise of Fascism.

Fascism has promoted mass sports and play in Italy and Germany not
only to provide recreation and insure physical fitness but also to promote
national unity and patriotic sentiment. Not since Greek days has so
much attention been given to mass sports by any important political
community. But the spirit of fascist play is markedly different from that
of the Attic Greeks. It is a sort of cross between Spartan military dis-
cipline and the Roman circuses.

We should, perhaps in this place, say a word about the increasing
popularity of gymnastics. We have already noted that gymnastics in
modern times had their origin as a phase of nationalism under Father
Jahn in Prussia early in the last century. From his movement there
developed the Turnverein, which became very popular in Germany and
among German-Americans. The disciples of Jahn relied primarily
upon heavy apparatus. Two other influences were particularly impor-
tant in the growth of the gymnasium in the United States. One was the
medical point of view, set forth forcefully by Dr. Edward M. Hartwell
in 1885, which stressed the desirability of physical training from the
standpoint of physical and mental hygiene. The other was the influence
which came from religion and social reform and led to the introduction
of gymnasiums in settlement houses, the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., and
the like.

While the first American gymnasiums generally adopted the heavy
apparatus of the Jahn system, calisthenics, introduced in the Hartford
Seminary by Catherine E. Beecher, became more popular. It laid much
stress upon setting-up exercises, and posture exercises. This innovation
was popularized by Dr. Dio Lewis, who was also indebted to the Swedish
system of free gymnastics. The man most influential in developing the
American system of gymnastic exercises, taking the best from both Euro-
pean and American practice, was Dudley A. Sargent, who became profes-
sor of physical training at Harvard University in 1878. The Young
Men's Christian Association, under the leadership of Robert Burny,
J. Gardner Smith, and Luther H. Gulick, pl&yed a very important part in
popularizing the gymnasium and American gymnastics. A training
school, under Y.M.C.A. auspices, was created at Springfield, Mass.

Except for the war years 1916 and 1940.

826 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Gulick originally had charge of this. The aim of the Y.M.C.A. was to
develop a "muscular Christianity/' The gymnasium movement was pop-
ularized by the development of competition between gymnastic teams
following 1899. The gymnasium has promoted not only gymnastic exer-
cises but also such sports as swimming, basketball, handball, and the
like.

Perhaps the most remarkable development in the whole history of
sports has been the rise of commercialized sports and amusements, mainly
since the first World War. This has been due, first and foremost, to the
growth of urban populations. Since restrictions of space have made it im-
possible for many city dwellers to participate directly in play and sports,
there has been a natural tendency to provide great mass spectacles which
thousands of spectators may watch and in which they may participate
vicariously.35 Then, the first World War gave a strong impetus to sports
and to vicarious mass participation therein. The strongest influence here
was a combination of patriotism and hygiene. Sports were believed to
bring about more perfect physique, which was desirable in potential sol-
diers.

Mass production methods tended to enter into sports themselves, in
order to meet the need for public spectacles and the health training of
the multitude. Acquisitive impulses also played their part, since busi-
nessmen quickly detected the possibility of profits in the sale of admis-
sions to public spectacles and in the marketing of various forms of
sporting goods. And the gambling spirit was not without influence in
this development. It has been an especially strong force in promoting
the development of horse racing and racetrack gambling.

While the commercialization of sports has had certain benefits, such as
making possible the very existence of mass spectacles, it has carried with
it certain abuses, especially when racketeers and gamblers have been able
to get control of some of these sports and "fix" the results, so as to pro-
mote their gambling earnings. Baseball has been unusually free from
this abuse, but even here the racketeers were able to fix the World Series
between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds in 1919. There
has been a considerable amount of well-warranted suspicion about the
integrity of boxing matches, and professional wrestling is shot through
with corruption and manipulation. It is not taken seriously by many
sport lovers. It is more a phase of comedy than of sport. But horse
racing has been most thoroughly victimized by the gamblers and rack-
eteers. Not only is much of the racetrack betting dishonestly conducted
and designed to line the pockets of gamblers, but at times even the races
themselves are fixed through the bribery of jockeys or the- doping of
horses. The operations of the racetrack gamblers and racketeers repre-
sent the most extreme pathological aspects of commercialized sports.

The manufacture and sale of various forms of sporting and athletic
goods, firearms, ammunition, and the like, have become a major busi-

35 On spectator sports and vicarious participation, see J. B. Nash, Spectatoritis,
Sears, 1932,

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 827

ness in the United States. It is estimated that, in 1929, when the sale of
these goods reached the maximum point, it totaled approximately
half a billion dollars. But even this is only a small fraction of the total
cost of all recreation in the United States, which was estimated to have
been, in 1929, approximately 10 billion dollars.

Recreation in the United States in the
Twentieth Century

Since the turn of the present century, the major trends in recreation
have been the popularization of play and sports, the institutionalization
of both as a phase of social planning, the promotion of games and sports
by private business enterprise, and the growth of great commercialized
public spectacles. E. C. Worman thus summarizes some of the major
forces that have brought about the expansion of recreational activities
and the facilities therefor:

Many factors have been responsible for this widespread development. Much
of it has grown out of the nature of our times. Technological advances in indus-
try, the growth of cities, the great hazards of motor transportation, the new
freedom of women, changing religious conceptions, the selfish exploitation of
natural resources, and the pollution of streams and ocean waters have played
their part in recent years to make the provision of recreation a practical necessity
for young and old of all classes.86

But even the rapid development of mass recreation in the last genera-
tion has not kept pace with the increased need for such physical and
mental outlets as recreation provides. The increased attention given to
recreation in the twentieth century has been ably justified by Jesse F.
Steiner:

The modern recreational movement is so firmly entrenched in American life
and its positive social results so decidedly outweigh its negative that it is no
longer difficult to justify the increasing financial outlays. The present genera-
tion hardly needs a reminder of the fact that wholesome recreation leads to both
bodily and mental health. It also breaks the monotony of labor and the exhaust-
ing routine and regimen of our mechanized industrial system. For thousands
recreation is now a kind of cult aiming at physical, mental and moral efficiency.
For additional thousands it opens the doors to a new world where during hours
of pleasurable leisure the onerous drudgeries of life are forgotten. Of an equal
if not greater importance is the outlet given our pent-up emotions. The theory
of emotional catharsis, first developed from the public games and spectacles of
ancient Greece, offers a psychological basis for the prevailing belief that recrea-
tion tends to reduce crime and delinquency. The large variety of sports and
amusements are, on this basis, more than mere diversions for hours of leisure;
they are vital factors in the progress of civilization. One of society's important
functions, therefore, is the cultivation of mass amusements, activities and diver-
sions appealing to all age groups from the preadolescent to the far advanced
in life. It is an insurance of social health.87

80 E. C. Worman, article "Recreation," Social Work Year Book, 1989, pp. 361-362.
87 W. F. Ogburn, et al., Recent Social Trends in the United States, McGraw-Hill,
1933, p. 913.

828 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Inventions and new types of games have helped to revolutionize recrea-
tion in the twentieth century. The profit motive has also had full play
in stimulating recreation. It was authoritatively estimated in 1940 that
we were spending between three and four billion dollars for commercial-
ized recreation. This gave industry a powerful vested interest in sup-
porting and expanding this field of recreational activity. The most
notable of the new forms of commercial amusement are moving pictures
and the radio. Radio manufacturers, broadcasting stations, and the gen-
eral public spend millions to bring the radio into the homes. Also, broad-
casting companies have advertisers who spend relatively lavishly to pro^
duce the programs which tliQ public enjoys. The automobile, by putting
the nation on wheels, has promoted many and varied forms of recreation?,
especially travel, camping, hunting, fishing, and the like.

Among the non-professionalized games in which the public participates,
probably the most notable trend has been the growth in the popularity
of golf and tennis. Golf still remains, partly on account of the expense
involved in belonging to golf and country clubs, pretty much of a class
game, with no marked mass participation. But tennis has become one of
the more popular sports. A large number of tennis courts are provided
by the American Lawn Tennis Association; there are many class courts
associated with golf clubs; and many more public tennis courts have been
provided by the cities of the United States. The greater availability
of tennis to the masses, as compared with golf, may be seen from the fact
that, in 1939, there were only 358 public golf courses, while 11,667 public
tennis courts were provided by American cities.

The increased interest in recreation and its social significance are
reflected in the expansion of public facilities for recreation and sports,
both in country and city areas. National parks and forests have been
opened up to travelers, and made available by the automobile. In 1940,
there were some 20,817,228 acres of national parks, 154 in number. In
1940, approximately 16,735,000 persons visited these national parks, over
90 per cent of them in private cars. Under the New Deal adminis-
tration an effort was made to improve the facilities for visitors to our
national parks. Some 46 new national park projects have been set up in
24 states. Camping facilities are provided for visitors from metropolitan
areas. The CCC and the WPA have taken a leading part in the prepara-
tion of these recreational demonstration projects. Closely associated
with national parks are our national forests, which now have about 175,-
000,000 acres under the Forest Service. Many of these forests contain
extensive recreational facilities. The increasing popularity and accessi-
bility of the national forests may be seen from the fact that, in 1916, they
were visited by only 3,000,000 persons, while in 1939 they were visited
by approximately 33,000,000 persons, not including those who merely
passed through them on their way to other destinations.

Besides national parks and forests there are many state, county, and
municipal parks. There are now about two million acres in state
parks. In 1935, there were reported to be some 526 county parks, em-

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 829

bracing 160,000 acres, and 15,000 municipal parks occupying about 380,-
000 acres. The municipal parks are especially useful for our crowded
city populations. It was estimated, in 1930, that the capital invested in
municipal parks amounted to considerably more than a billion dollars,
and that over $100,000,000 is spent annually to maintain and operate
them. A recent trend has been the acquisition by cities of park areas
outside the corporate limits of municipalities. There are about 130,000
acres of such parks at present.

A notable recent development has been the growth of public play-
grounds, especially in connection with school and community recreation
centers. The most potent force promoting this trend has been the Na-
tional Recreation Association, created in 1906. It was then known as
the Playground Association of America. In 1910, there were only about
1,300 public playgrounds; the number had increased to 7,240 in 1930, and
to 9,749 in 1939. The extent and variety of public recreation facilities
provided by American cities today is shown in the following table from
the 1940 yearbook of the National Recreation Association, giving the
data for 1939:

PUBLIC RECREATION FACILITIES IN THE UNITED STATES 1939

Facilities Number of Cities

Supervised playgrounds, 9,749 792

Indoor community recreation centers, 4,123 444

Recreation buildings, 1,666 395

Athletic fields, 875 422

Baseball diamonds, 3,846 704

Public bathing beaches, 548 253

Nine-hole golf courses, 146 114

Eighteen-hole golf courses, 212 135

Indoor swimming pools, 315 122

Outdoor swimming pools, 866 399

Public tennis courts, 11,617 716

Wading pools, 1,545 426

Archery ranges, 455 257

Bowling greens, 217 77

Handball courts, 1,983 173

Horseshoe courts, 9,326 646

Ice-skating areas, 2,968 427

Picnic areas, 3,511 476

Play streets, 298 46

Shuffleboard courts, 2,299 259

Ski jumps, 116 64

Softball diamonds, 8,995 736

Stadiums, 244 176

Theaters, 110 70

Toboggan slides, 301 114

The most thoroughly revolutionized phase of recreation has been
travel, mainly as a result of the production of low priced cars and the
building of better highways on which these cars may be operated. Good
roads have been extended into mountain, forest, and national park areas.
In 1930, some 92 per cent of the visitors to the national forests and 85
per cent of the visitors to national parks used automobiles. In 1916,
about 15,000 automobiles entered the national parks, while by 1931 the

830 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

number had increased to approximately 900,000. Motor tours have be-
come increasingly popular as a method of taking a vacation. The Amer-
ican Automobile Association estimated that, in 1929, about 45,000,000
persons took vacation trips by automobile in the United States. The
AAA estimated that in 1940 some 5 billion dollars were spent on motor
vacations. Perhaps most significant are the short automobile rides taken
within the community or to near-by places during leisure hours each day.
The automobile has, of course, facilitated forms of recreation other than
travel, since it is used for fishing, hunting, going to the movies, and any
number of sports removed some distance from the home.

Closely related to motor travel in general has been the development of
outdoor camping. The American Camping Association has devoted
much effort to raising the standards of camping equipment and leader-
ship. The federal government, through the WPA and the CCC, has
labored to increase camping facilities. Approximately 10,000,000 per-
sons camp somewhere in the national forests each year. The hostel
movement of European youth was introduced to this country in 1935,
being especially popular in New England. This provides attractive
camping facilities for young persons visiting scenic areas. There were
227 youth hostels, with 11,000 members, in 1940. Automobile travel and
camping have been more closely combined than ever with the advent of
automobile trailers. Many of these are on the road today, as well as in
the numerous tourist camps which are available along all the good high-
ways. Trailers concentrate near resorts and form veritable trailer cities,
especially in areas like Florida and California during the winter season.

The better facilities for travel and camping have encouraged hunting
and fishing. In average years over 7,000,000 hunting and fishing licenses
are issued, and millions of dollars are spent for hunting and fishing
equipment.

Water sports have increased in recent years. The number of public
bathing beaches maintained by American cities increased from 127 in
1923 to 548 in 1939. In Chicago, during the summer of 1930, some
7,000,000 persons used the public bathing beaches. The number of pub-
lic swimming pools has also increased more than 100 per cent since 1923,
some 1,181 being reported in 1939. It has been estimated that there are
over 3,500 private and public swimming pools in the United States. In
1937, some 124 cities reported an attendance of over 100,000,000 at bath-
ing beaches and swimming pools.

The increased popularity of the automobile on land has been paralleled
by the use* of motor boats for recreation. In 1930 there were 250,000
registered motor boats, at least three-quarters of which were used for
pleasure.

Skiing, formerly a recreation chiefly limited to Alpine and other Euro-
pean resorts, has attracted an ever greater number of Americans in areas
where there is snow. Owing to the relative difficulty of motor travel in
winter weather, the railroads have cooperated in bringing skiers to suitable
locations. Special cars for skiers are added to regular trains, and special

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 831

ski trains are run from city centers to highlands and mountain areas.
Airplanes are also widely used by the more opulent skiers.

Americans are notable organizers and joiners; hence, it is not surprising
to find, besides local organizations devoted to the promotion of sports, na-
tional organizations which have formulated rules, stimulated activities,
and endeavored to raise the general level of sportsmanship in various
fields. Among these are The United States Golf Association, the Amer-
ican Lawn Tennis Association, Amateur Athletic Union of the United
States, National Amateur Athletic Federation, American Olympic Asso-
ciation, Amateur Fencers' League of America, National Association of
Amateur Oarsmen, Amateur Billiard Association of America, American
Skating Union of the United States, American Canoe Association, Amer-
ican Snow Shoe Union, National Association of Scientific Angling Clubs,
National Cycling Association, National Horse Shoe Pitchers' Association,
National Ski Association, National Amateur Casting Association, Na-
tional Collegiate Athletic Association, and United States Football Asso-
ciation.

By all odds the most important organization promoting an interest in
recreation and raising the standards therein has been the National
Recreation Association. This grew out of the devotion and enthusiasm
of Joseph Lee (1862-1937), of Boston. In 1894, Lee learned in a news-
paper that boys had been arrested for playing ball in a street. He
indignantly protested that "those boys were arrested for living." From
that time onward, he devoted himself to the playground movement, with
the text that "the boy without a playground is the father to the man
without a job." Important social workers, like Jane Addains and Jacob
A. Rii£, encouraged Lee. President Theodore Roosevelt enthusiastically
supported the program.

The first meeting was called together in New York in the winter of
1904-05 by Dr. Henry S. Curtis, the most notable members of the orig-
inal group being Lee and Dr. Luther H. Gulick. A number of meetings
were held in the next few months, and, in November, 1905, the name of
the Playground Association of America was chosen for the new organ-
ization. The organization was formally launched on April 12, 1906, with
the warm approval of President Roosevelt. Lee, one of our leading
authorities on recreation, became president of the organization in 1910,
and remained at its head until 1935. The name was later changed to the
National Recreation Association. Lee was a wealthy man and generously
endowed the recreation movement, giving some $360,000 to the Play-
ground Association. He was rewarded by seeing the number of play-
grounds in the country increase by more than tenfold between 1910 and
1935. The National Recreation Association not only has labored vigor-
ously to increase interest in sports and play ; it has done more than any
other organization to promote the growth of playgrounds and to emphasize
the necessity of supervised play and recreation. It has tried to make the
latter a source of personality-building as well as of physical exercise and
emotional outlet.

832 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Mainly as a result of the work of the National Recreation Associa-
tion, there has been a remarkable expansion of community recreational
facilities, a matter which we have already mentioned. Though the public
playgrounds are almost exclusively an American institution, the play-
ground movement was really introduced into this country from Europe.
In 1885, Dr. Marie Zakrzewska visited Berlin and witnessed children
playing on sandpiles in the public parks of that city. Upon her return,
she opened a sand garden in Boston. These early play centers for small
children later grew into model playgrounds, equipped with the customary
apparatus. The social settlements also encouraged the early growth of
playgrounds, Hull House in Chicago opening one in 1893, and the Henry
Street Settlement in New York, another in 1895.

By the beginning of the present century, New York, Chicago, Philadel-
phia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New Haven, Providence, San Francisco and
other large cities had begun to provide public playgrounds. The move-
ment gained rapid headway after the formation of the National Recrea-
tion Association in 1906. In some 27 states, cities now have the right to
set up public recreation systems. By 1939, some 792 cities provided
9,749 public playgrounds, together with 4,123 indoor community recrea-
tion centers, and 1,666 recreation buildings. There were about 100,-
000,000 participants in the recreation centers and recreation buildings.
In 1939, no less than 1,204 urban communities were supplying organized
public recreation facilities, at a total annual cost of approximately $57,-
000,000. The degree to which supervised play has developed is shown
by the fact that in 1939 these 1,204 urban communities hired some 25,-
042 recreation workers to supervise playground activities. Along with
these were some 18,000 supplementary supervisors, paid out of emergency
funds supplied mainly by the federal government. And in addition to
both of these were some 10,000 volunteer supervisors. The growth of the
supervised play movement may be noted from the fact that, in 1912, there
were only 5,320 paid supervisors of recreation, and the total amount ex-
pended for public community recreation was only $4,000,000.

Even private industry has extensively fostered recreation to improve
.the health and morale of employees. In a survey of 2,700 concerns, cov-
ered by the investigation of the National Industrial Conference Board, it
was found that 552 provided athletic facilities and 411 had clubhouses for
such activities.

A remarkable development in recreation and the extension of recrea-
tional facilities has been the generous aid rendered by the federal govern-
ment under various New Deal auspices. E. C. Worman thus summarizes
the extent of this government aid to community recreation:

By 1938 the emergency relief agencies of the federal government, including the
WPA, the National Youth Administration (NYA) and the Resettlement Admin-
istration (now the Farm Security Administration) had spent one billion dollars
for recreation purposes. At one time there were 49,000 persons employed by the
Recreation Division of the WPA and a similar number by the NYA. Literally
thousands of recreation facilities, such as camps, picnicking grounds, trails, swim-

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 833

ming pools, and so forth, have been built. The Department of the Interior
through the National Park Service and the Office of Education; the Department
of Agriculture through the Forest Service, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,
the Bureau of Biological Survey, and the Bureau of Home Economics; and 32
other bureaus or offices are related in some way to recreation service, much of
which has developed during the depression.88

To be more specific, to June, 1939, WPA workers had built 7,621 new
recreation buildings, 2,394 athletic fields, 2,078 playgrounds, 1,164 new
swimming and wading pools, and 6,347 tennis courts, and had cleared
332,618 acres of new park projects. The federal government contributed
$26,000,000 to support supervised play in 1939.

This revolutionary increase in recreational facilities has been accom-
panied by a more dynamic philosophy with respect to play. There has
been a shift of interest from mere play itself to an ever greater considera-
tion of the effects of play upon participants. Physical hygiene has been
supplemented by mental hygiene. There is no longer a tendency to
believe that, once a playground is set up and supervisors supplied, the
process will take care of itself. A serious research interest in the nature
and effects of play has been developed. This new philosophy and the
new objectives of play and recreation have been well summarized by
Dr. V. K. Brown:

Our objectives are moving over into new ground. Where we once were con-
tent to issue medals of award for signal accomplishment, and to consider victory
a sufficient end in itself, in view of the striving and the sacrifice which made the
victory possible, now we are concerned far more with the spiritual significances
of that victory to the victor himself, to the steadying fact it represents to him —
the fact, however later life may buffet him, that once, at least, in a contest where
he threw his whole self into the issue, in spite of opposition, fatigue, and difficulty,
he fought through to triumph, and stood at the end unconquered and uncon-
querable. Long ago, we passed the point where we were interested exclusively in
what people do in recreation ; the trend is now to consider, as more vital, rather
what the thing done itself does, in turn, to the doer of it.39

The development of recreational facilities in rural areas has lagged
behind the progress in cities and the larger village communities. A care-
ful survey in 1935 showed that rural communities had a 96 per cent defi-
ciency in personnel for recreational supervision and an even greater lack
of recreational facilities. The very nature of rural life provides plenty
of outdoor activity, but organized and supervised recreation in the coun-
try has been only slightly developed. A number of organizations have
endeavored to overcome this deplorable backwardness of rural recrea-
tion. The extension service of the United States Department of Agri-
culture has promoted rural recreation through the 4-H Clubs and has
encouraged camping by rural women. The National Recreation Associa-
tion has held systematic rural institutes for more than a decade and has
trained about 60,000 rural recreation leaders, drawn from schools,
churches, the Grange, 4-H Clubs, and the like. Some of the emergency

38 "Recreation," Social Work Year Book, 1989, pp. 371-372.

89 V. K. Brown, "Trends in Recreation Service," Recreation, May, 1931, p. 63.

834 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

relief work carried on by the WPA has befen devoted to the improvement
of rural recreational facilities.

But far and away the most important practical advance in rural recre-
atipnal facilities has been the appearance and growth of consolidated and
centralized schools. These merge and concentrate the resources of the
rural community and provide playground facilities accessible to rural
youth. All the better schools of this sort have paid supervisors of ath-
letics. But even here the facilities favor the participation of the children
who reside in the village where the centralized school is located. The
rural children can normally use these facilities only during noon and
recess hours, since the buses bring them to the schools at the moment
school begins and takes them home as soon as the period of instruction is
over. Most of the new mechanical facilities for recreation and amuse-
ment, notably the automobile, movies, and radio, are enjoyed by the
rural population.

In spite of the remarkable development of recreational facilities, we
have as yet only scratched the surface in the way of providing thor-
oughly adequate playground facilities for American youth, to say nothing
of American adults. In 1930 it was estimated that only 5,000,000 out
of approximately 32,000,000 children between the ages of 6 and 18 were
served by public playgrounds. Even in 1938, it was estimated that at
least 8,000,000 urban children and 12,000,000 rural children had no pub-
lic playground facilities. There is also a shortage of park acreage to
meet the needs of the present urban population. Notwithstanding the
growth of parks and better automobile transportation, most young people
living in cities still have to depend upon motion pictures, dance halls, pool
rooms, and the like for most of their diversion. One of the most notori-
ous inadequacies of our day has been the failure, as yet, to force the
public school system to cooperate intelligently and completely in the
creation of a well-rounded municipal recreation program.

Despite their inadequacy, recreation and leisure-time activities already
constitute a big business in themselves. They involve annual expendi-
tures greater than any New Deal budget before 1940. In 1930, it was
estimated that the total cost of recreation, broadly interpreted, amounted
to a little more than $10,000,000,000, nearly two thirds of which could be
attributed, directly and indirectly, to the use of automobiles and motor
boats for recreational purposes. Professor Steiner has compiled the
table on page 835, itemizing the expenditures for recreation, in the year
1930.

An outstanding leisure-time phenomenon has been the development of
athletic sports as public spectacles and the commercialization of the lat-
ter. Millions attend these spectacles in person; many more millions
participate in them vicariously through the newspapers, moving pictures,
and radio broadcasts. Almost everything else is forced out of public
attention at the time of radio broadcasts of championship boxing matches,
World Series ball games, and leading inter-collegiate football games.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 835

ESTIMATED ANNUAL COST OF RECREATION *o

(In thousands of dollars)

Amount of Expenditures

A. Governmental expenditures:

1. Municipalities $ 147,179

2. Counties 8,600

3. Federal 9,300

4. States 28,331

Total $ 193,410

B. Travel and mobility:

1. Vacation travel in U. S.

(a) Automobile touring $3,200,000

(b) Travel by rail 750,000

(c) Travel by air and water 25,000

2. Vacation travel abroad

(a) To Canada 266,283

(b) To Mexico 55,642

(c) To countries overseas 391,470

(d) To insular possessions 1,326

( e ) Alien American tourists abroad 76,000

3. Pleasure-use of cars, boats, etc.

(a) Automobiles (except touring) 1,246,000

(b) Motor boats 460,000

(c) Motor cycles 10,796

(d) Bicycles 9,634

Total 6,492,151

C. Commercial amusements:

1. Moving pictures $1,500,000

2. Qther admissions 166,000

3. Cabarets and night clubs 23,725

4. Radios and radio broadcasting 525,000

Total ~7777TT 2,214,725

D. Leisure time associations:

1. Social and athletic clubs $125,000

2. Luncheon clubs 7,500

3. Lodges 175,000

4. Youth service and similar organizations 75,000

Total 382,500

E. Games, sports, outdoor life, etc.:

1. Toys, games, playground equipment $113,800

2. Pool, billiards, bowling equipment 12,000

3. Playing cards 20,000

4. Sporting and athletic goods 500,000

5. Hunting and fishing license 12,000

6. College football 21,500

7. Resort hotels 75,000

8. Commercial and other camps 47,000

9. Fireworks 6,771

10. Phonographs and accessories 75,000

Total 883,071

Total annual cost of recreation $10,165,857

Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. II, p. 949.

836 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Baseball still remains the great "national game," though it is now being
hard pressed by inter-collegiate and professional football. In 1941 each
of the major leagues drew an attendance of over 5,000,000, the American
League having an attendance of 5,220,519 and the National League of
5,029,689.

The greatest attendance comes at the time of the World Series games.
This reached its maximum in 1926, when 328,051 saw the series between
the St. Louis National League team and the New York American League
team. The receipts in this year were $1,207,064. The nearest to a
duplication of these figures came in 1936 when 302,924 persons witnessed
the series between the New York National League and the New York
American League teams, the receipts being $1,204,399.

Inter-collegiate football also grew into a big business. In 1930, some
3,289,000 persons attended these games, the receipts being $8,363,674, a
gain of 210 per cent over the figures of 1921. Seating facilities grew from
929,000 in 1920 to 2,307,000 in 1930. The figures for 1930 were based
upon the reports of 49 institutions as to attendance, and 65 institutions as
to receipts. It has been estimated that the total attendance at all inter-
collegiate football games in 1930 was over 10 million with receipts of
over 21 million dollars. The increasing commercialization of inter-
collegiate football has brought serious criticism from educators, who feel
that this development has distracted attention from learning.41

There has been a notable growth in the popularity of professional foot-
ball, especially in the larger cities of the East. The teams are recruited
chiefly from the stars of former inter-collegiate teams. The attendance
at these games has come to rival seriously the figures in the most thrilling
and exciting inter-collegiate games. This popularity of professional
football has become most marked in the years since 1930. Official organ-
izations of professional football leagues were instituted in 1941.

Boxing, particularly in the heavy-weight class, has produced a greater
attendance and larger receipts than any other type of commercialized
sporting spectacle. A generation ago, men like Corbett and Fitz-
simmons fought for a purse of a few thousand dollars, but a million-dollar
gate was produced in 1921, at the Dempsey-Carpentier fight at Boyle's
Thirty Acres in Jersey City. The high point in professional boxing
came in 1927, when the return engagement between Dempsey and Tunney
drew a gate of $2,650,000. The inferior quality of heavy-weight boxers
in the decade which followed produced smaller gates, though the most
perfunctory engagement brought an income which would have seemed
mythical in the days of John L. Sullivan. Even the fight between Jack
Sharkey and Tommy Loughran in 1929 paid $320,335, as against $270,755
for the dramatic Johnson-Jefferies fight in 1910, which marked the larg-
est gate ever known down to that time. The unusual fistic prowess of
Joe Louis, and his unprecedented willingness to defend his heavyweight
"crown" frequently, have stimulated interest in boxing in the last few

41 See above, pp. 761-763.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 837

years, but even here the game has suffered for lack of competent oppo-
nents for Louis. There has been less popular interest in the far more
exciting fights between lighter weight pugilists, though the remarkable
achievements of Henry Armstrong in 1938-1940 brought about a consid-
erable following for this class of fighters.

Professional wrestling has not attained the prestige or popularity of
commercialized boxing. The sport has not been as thoroughly regulated
as boxing, championships are always in dispute, and the sport is not
unfairly suspected of much dishonesty and the "fixing of bouts." How-
ever, wrestling has become ostensibly more rough and brutal in recent
years, perhaps thus seeking to increase popular following. Some major
bouts do attract large crowds, but nothing comparable to those at cham-
pionship boxing matches.

Despite efforts to curb racetrack gambling, horse racing has become
an important commercialized sport, though by no means attracting the
attendance of baseball and football games. Large sums are paid to own-
ers of winning horses. In 1920, the earnings were approximately $7,775,-
000. By 1930, they had almost doubled. But the sums involved in
the stakes won by horses are insignificant when compared to the gam-
bling bill associated with horse racing. It has been estimated by experts
that the annual losses by those betting on horse races in the United States
amounts to at least one and a half billion dollars.

This brief discussion of the development of recreation in the twentieth
century will suffice to demonstrate the vast increase of interest and
the enormous growth of receipts. Nevertheless, the majority of Ameri-
cans p-re not provided in any adequate manner with opportunities for
wholesome recreation. Further, the increasing stress upon victory and
championships, at whatever cost, rather than the enjoyment of sport for
its own sake, destroys the intellectual and cultural effects of a great deal
of our recreational activity. The latter is also degraded through the
excessive commercialization of sports, with occasional overt dishonesty
and exploitation by gamblers. However, we may expect the revolution-
ary growth of recreational interests, activity and expenditures to con-
tinue, and we may hope for an ever increased control of this development
by sound psychological, sociological, and aesthetic principles. Professor
Steiner has well summarized the outstanding trends in contemporary
recreation:

This brief survey of recent recreational developments gives some conception
of the magnitude of the leisure time field, as well as its growing importance in
present day affairs. The trends that stand out most prominently and seem to
be characteristic of the whole movement may be summarized as follows : interest
in active participation in games and sports; the nationwide vogue of automobile
touring and pleasure travel; the development of outdoor life and vacation activi-
ties; acceptance of governmental responsibility for providing public recreational
facilities; expansion of the field of commercial amusements; the desire for amuse-
ments that provide thrills and excitement; preoccupation with the outcome of
competitive games and sports; popularity of forms of creation that promote
social relations between the sexes; and the development of organizations that

838 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

facilitate recreational interests. More briefly, the two most important trends in
modern recreation in this country have been the widespread development of
commercialized facilities for the enjoyment of passive amusements, and the rapid
growth of private and public facilities for participation in a large variety of
games and sports and other active recreational activities. From the point of
view of numbers reached, commercial amusements, largely because of motion
pictures and the radio, seem to occupy the leading position, but when costs are
taken into consideration, the bulk of our recreational expenditures must be
charged against active rather than passive forms of leisure time pursuits. . . .
However difficult their solution, modern forms of recreation have become so
deeply rooted in our social fabric that there can be no thought of going back
to the simpler pleasures of an earlier generation. To a degree hitherto unknown,
sports, games and amusements have gained recognition as a vital part of human
living and are acceptecl as a necessity for which provision must be made. The
depression is temporarily curtailing some of these activities but there is no evi-
dence of any declining interest. During the next few years the curve of recrea-
tional growth may not rise as rapidly as in the immediate past, but there seems
to be no doubt that it will continue to move upward. What is needed is a larger
degree of statesmanlike planning than has yet been attempted in order that the
further development of the recreation movement may be as much as possible
in the interests of the general welfare.42

Art as a Phase of Leisure-Time Activity

Along with play and recreation, we must surely consider art as an out-
standing expression of the leisure-time activity of man. In our discus-
sion of art we shall interpret it in the broadest sense as including archi-
tecture, sculpture, painting, music, the drama, literature, and all phases
of aesthetic expression.

There is no sharp break or wide gulf between play and art. Indeed,
art is a sort of racial expression of the play motive in the individual.
As Irwin Edrnan puts it:

The arts serve in an important sense the same function in the race that play
does in the individual. On the part of the artist, despite the fact that the arts
involve technical difficulties and that their pursuance often entails social sacrifices,
they have something of the quality of play and they constitute a type of spon-
taneous action which any polity might well wish to insure for all its citizens.4211

In briefly summarizing the role of the arts in leisure time activities we
shall deal only with the social aspects of art, making no pretense what-
ever to giving a technical analysis of the history and nature of art.

Perhaps as good an introductory definition of art as any we could
offer is suggested by Alfred D. F. Hamlin, who says that "art, in its
broadest sense, is the purposeful exercise of human activities for the
accomplishment of some predetermined end of use or pleasure. Art is
thus set apart from Nature which exists and operates outside of man, and
which can enter the domain of art only when and insofar as man calls
her into his service by employing her powers for his own purposed
ends." 43 The deliberate element in art is more directly related to the
practical arts than to the fine arts. The latter have no function other

42 Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. II, pp. 954, 957.

*2a Article "Art," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, pp. 225-226.

48 Article "Art," Encyclopaedia Americana, Vol. 2, p. 335.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 839

than to provide enjoyment and they are mainly the product of sponta-
neous creative activity on the part of the artist.

In discussing the arts a sharp distinction is usually made between the
fine arts, and the useful or practical arts. The fine arts are characterized
^primarily by the fact that they have little practical utility but are capa-
ble of bringing spontaneous and immediate enjoyment to the artist and
the observer. In the broadest sense, the practical arts include all indus-
tries and the techniques for producing food, shelter, and clothing. Often
the term is given a more limited application, describing objects that are
both useful and beautiful, such as Indian baskets, beautiful vases, and
decorative iron work. The distinction between the fine arts and the
practical arts is not always clearly drawn. In primitive times, tools and
weapons were a matter of artistic effort as well as of utilitarian value,
and even ostensibly artistic products had a practical value through their
relation to religion and magic. Pictures of animals, for example, were
thought to give some magical control over them and to facilitate the
process of hunting. Among the Greeks, and again in the medieval craft
gilds, there was such a pride in workmanship that even utilitarian prod-
ucts were turned out with something of the artist's pride and seriousness.
The industrial arts, especially the handmade metal work, of colonial
America were probably the outstanding art products of that era.

Since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mechanical industry, a
real gulf seems to have appeared between the fine arts and the practical
arts. However, recently an effort has been made to give some artistic
flavor to objects of utility. We see this in the artistic design of sky-
scrapers, in the attention given to the beautification of automobiles, in
the decoration of buildings, and in the design of furniture. The drab
standardization of former days is passing away.

The fine arts may be regarded, in a fundamental way, as a product of
our emotions. Sex, the play impulse, and other phases of the drive
for self-expression seem to lie at the foundation of art. But this fact
should not obscure the outstanding element in the origin of art, namely
that art is a social product. The emotions which underlie art are called
forth mainly by social situations and needs, such as religion, war, sex
and family activities, ritual, and group play. Art serves a definite social
function in providing sources of spontaneous enjoyment for social groups.
Art provides expression for social values. The changes in artistic ideals
and methods are closely related to underlying social transformations.
However individualized may be the emotional experiences of the artist,
it remains a fact that art is socially conditioned in its origins, functions,
and manifestations.

Landmarks in the Development of Art

There are several outstanding elements to be emphasized in describ-
ing primitive art.44 Since religion dominates all phases of primitive life,

44 T/. E. A. Parkyn, Prehistoric Art, Longmans, 1915.

840 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

it is not surprising that it exerted a great influence over primitive art.
Many authorities believe, for example, that the marvelous cave paint-
ings of the stone age were produced because of , the belief that they would
give the hunters a magical control over the animals drawn. Some author-
ities question this interpretation, but there is no doubt of the importance
of magic in primitive art. The great stone monuments of the Neolithic
age attest the degree to which religion could bring forth social effort of a
fundamentally artistic character. The totem poles of the American
Indians admirably illustrate the fusion of the social and religious in
primitive art. Another phase of primitive art was its practicality.
Much of primitive artistic effort and design had a utilitarian basis and
was connected with the development of weapons, tools, textiles, and
pottery. There were relatively few products of primitive art which did
not have some utility, real or imaginary, of a magical or industrial sort.
A third characteristic of primitive art lay in the use of symbolism,
wherein a part was made to stand for the whole, and conventionalization,
which might go so far that the original figures and objects would be
unrecognizable. Decorative tendencies tended to crowd out realism. In
some cases, primitive decorative art attained an elaborate technique, as
in the Maya art of Yucatan and Guatemala.

In the ancient Near East, art became far more divorced from the com-
mon people than in primitive times. In primitive society, almost every-
body participated in artistic activity in one way or another. But with the
rise of a rich leisure class of kings and nobles, art became limited mainly
to this group, though the people might view it from afar. The religioufe
motive was still powerful. The sculptures of gods, guardian animals and
monsters, and the temples, tombs, and pyramids attest the strength of
the religious motive in art. The ruling classes exploited art to glorify
their status and prestige. This tendency is shown in the remains of their
elaborately decorated palaces. Assyrian art expressed and glorified the
war motive more, perhaps, than has been the case in any other period of
history. Since sex and reproduction were prominent in oriental re-
ligion, it is not surprising that they were conspicuous in oriental art. This
was especially true of the art of the Hittities, Cretans, and Philistines.

No other people have been as profoundly influenced by or devoted to
art as were the ancient Greeks, especially the Greeks of ancient Athens.
With most of us in the United States, art is something apart from our
daily life. It does not in any large sense pervade our very being and
order our reactions toward life. But this was exactly what it did with
the cultured Greeks of Periclean Athens. To them, art was not some-
thing to look at in bored fashion in a museum on a Sunday afternoon, but
it was a vital aspect of their existence. Such things as rhythm, propor-
tion, balance, order, and taste were as important to the cultivated Greeks
as bank balances, stock-exchange reports, baseball scores, and fashion
plates are to us today. The artist then was regarded as one of the most
honored and respected members of the community. The Greeks never
regarded a work of art as a "good" existing in a void, Plato seems to

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 841

have regarded such an idea as inimical to social well-being and looked
askance upon "pure" aesthetics.

Since the Greeks possessed a high degree of civic devotion and com-
munity spirit, the artists' works often depicted the more notable civic
activities or achievements. The influence of religion on Greek art cannot
be ignored. While the cultivated Greeks were free from gross and brutal
superstition, they reveled in a rich and suggestive mythology which fur-
nished many and varied themes for art.

Amotig the Greeks art became, for the first time, a subject of philosoph-
ical speculation. Plato and Aristotle discussed the nature and desirable
qualities of art and its role in life. They thus created that branch of
philosophy which we call aesthetics. Art exerted an important influence
on the Greek theories of morals. Aristotle held that the good life is one
controlled by the ideals of the disciplined artist and consists in steering a
happy mean between self-denial and indulgence.

So profound was the artistic influence among the Greeks that it even
affected their industrial life. It produced an ideal of craftsmanship that
was virtually artistic. There was a narrow borderline between the
Greek workman and the Greek artist. Indeed, some of the great Greek
temples and other works of art were made in part by Greek craftsmen
drawn, from everyday industrial pursuits. While the slaves and some of
the lower order of workmen may not have had much part in making or
appreciating Greek art, it is probable that Greek art dominated the whole
populace of Athens to a greater degree than has ever been the case before
or since. The more backward and warlike of the Greek city-states were
little interested in art, and Greek art really means the artistic ideals and
achievements of ancient Athens and Alexandria.

The Romans added little in the way of original contributions to art.
They mainly adopted Greek ideals and models in art. The wealth of
Rome, at its height, produced elaborate works of art based on Greek prec-
edents. But the extent of the Empire permitted the Romans to gather
artistic and architectural inspiration from other sources than Hellas.
Many oriental elements entered into Roman art, especially into Roman
architecture, with its wide use of the arch and dome construction. The
rebuilding of Rome by Trajan and Hadrian represented the culmination
of Roman artistic achievements. Even here the chief artists were Hel-
lenistic, and Trajan's chief city-planner was a Syrian architect.

The Greeks and Romans were chiefly interested in things of this world
and, while the religious motive was strong in classical art, the purposes
and results of Greek and Roman art were primarily secular. Hence it
was inevitable that the rise of Christianity would work a marked revolu-
tion in the arts. The Greeks were perfectly frank in making an appeal
to the senses; The Christians regarded this as sinful, and the new atti-
tude had its effect in suppressing nudity in art and in otherwise lessening
its sensuous appeal. But as soon as the Christians became established,
they became deeply impressed with the services which art might render
to the glorification of God. So) it was not long before the richest and

842 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

most civilized of the early Christians, those in the Eastern or Byzantine
Empire, were erecting churches more magnificent and more elaborately
decorated than any temples of pagan antiquity. Such, for example, was
the great church of Sancta Sophia built by the Emperor Justinian in
Constantinople, in the first half of the sixth century. Soon the western
Christians were erecting the impressive Romanesque and Gothic cathe-
drals of the Middle Ages. These were never, however, as elaborately
decorated as the Byzantine churches. The erection of medieval cathe-
drals almost matched the building of the Greek temples as a matter of
community effort and pride. A medieval archbishop thus describes,
somewhat lyrically, the building of the cathedral of Chartres in France:

The inhabitants of Chartres have combined to aid in the contruction of their
church by transporting the materials. . . . Since then the faithful of our diocese
and of other neighboring regions have formed associations for the same object;
they admit no one into the company unless he has been to confession. . . . They
elect a chief under whose direction they conduct their wagons in silence and with
humility. Who has ever seen? Who has ever heard tell, in times past, that
powerful princes of the; world, that men brought up in honors and in wealth, that
nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness
of carts, and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the abode of
Christ these wagons, loaded with wines, grains, oil, stone, timber, and all that is
necessary for the construction of the church? . . . They march in silence that
not a murmur is heard. . . . When they halt on the road nothing is heard but
confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer. . . . When they have
reached the church they arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and
during the whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and canticles. On
each wagon they light tapers.45

Inasmuch as the medieval cathedral was a real community center for
secular as well as religious life, the populace of medieval cities were thus
able to participate directly in enjoying the chief products of medieval
art. In the craft gilds we find a devotion to fine workmanship as
notable as that which characterized the Greek craftsmen. Indeed, the
craft gilds imposed severe penalties on workers who turned out inferior
products. And, just as the better Greek workmen helped in the con-
struction of Greek temples, so the medieval craftsmen did most of the
Work in the building of the medieval cathedrals. The intimate relation
between craftsmanship and art is also well illustrated by the beautiful
illuminated manuscripts and tapestries of the Middle Ages.

The most notable outburst of artistic enthusiasm and productivity be-
tween Greek days and our own came in the period of the so-called Renais-
sance, which fell roughly in the three centuries between 1350 and 1650.
There are a number of reasons for this. There was a great revival of
interest in Greek and Roman culture. As a result, the pagan enthusiasm
for art gained respectability. A sort of adjustment between Christianity
and the pagan point of view was achieved in what is called the cult of
beauty. Beauty was believed to provide man with, a glimpse into the

45 J. W. Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, Appleton-
Ceutury, 1928, p. 672.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 843

higher world of the spirit. It connected the mundane with the eternal.
With the revival of the pagan outlook more importance was attached to
man as man, and human experience came to be regarded as the practical
measure of all things. While most early Renaissance art was highly
religious in theme and much Renaissance art always remained so, there
was a gradual secularization of art. This reached its highest develop-
ment in Dutch painting, where something resembling a return to the
humanity of paganism was manifested. Another tendency during the
Renaissance was the marked growth of individuality. This reacted
upon art in the way of stimulating artistic activity and producing a
number of world-famed individual artists in every field of artistic ac-
tivity. Never before or since in western Europe has art enjoyed such
popularity or brought forth such notable products as during the era of
the Renaissance.

The Catholic Church approved of Renaissance art and did little to
combat the pagan and secular trends. But Puritanism, born of the
Protestant Reformation, was highly hostile to many forms of art. It
revived the ascetic tendencies of early Christianity and was violently
opposed to any appeal to the senses. It did much either to suppress
art in Protestant countries or to divert it into forms of expression in
which an appeal to the senses could not be regarded as in any way
sinful.40 Of course, not all Protestants were Puritans and not all Prot-
estant art was blighted by puritanism.

The secularization of art, which had been aided by the Dutch, was
carried further by the reaction of overseas discoveries upon art. Ocean
scenes, ships, sailors, adventurers, and idealized Indian maidens in part
displaced priests, martyrs, and the Virgin as pictorial subjects. This
secularizing influence was also aided by the Rationalism of the period of
the Enlightenment. The court life of the time, especially in France, pro-
moted a sort of nco-pagan realism in depicting the eroticism and voluptu-
ousness of the era. Venus became more popular than the Virgin with
the artists of the day. A new enthusiasm for the study and the practice
of art was generated by the Romantic movement of the first half of the
nineteenth century. Romanticism especially emphasized the importance
of the emotions as a guide to life and its values. This directly stimulated
artistic expression.

The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
had an important reaction upon art. Hitherto, industry had been
carried on by handicraft methods and there was some opportunity for
art to express itself through work in fine craftsmanship. The mass
production of the factory system did not permit personal joy and artistic
satisfaction in work. John Ruskin and William Morris in the middle of
the nineteenth century came forward to stress the need for artistic ex-
pression among the mass of the people. They vigorously condemned
the drab dreariness and drudgery of factory production. Both empha-

46 For a more favorable view of the Reformation and art, see G. G. Coulton, Art
and the Reformation, Knopf, 1928.

844 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

sized the desirability of reviving the handicrafts and manual arts and
giving greater play to the motive of craftsmanship. An American echo
of this attitude was seen in the work of Elbert Hubbard and, more
recently, in that of Ralph Borsodi. The economist, Thorstein Veblen,
reemphasized what he called the instinct of workmanship and condemned
its extinction by the factory system.

The rise of capitalism and the growth of a class of wealthy men repre-
sented another influence on art arising from the Industrial Revolution.
Many of these new plutocrats, while they had little personal knowledge
or appreciation of art, became collectors of art as a phase of their leisure-
class activity. It gave them social prestige and ministered to their
zeal for display. They not only collected art for their own personal
galleries but also founded art museums. In this way, they contributed
to art appreciation and education. This was offset in some degree by
the elaborate and costly monstrosities which they all too often erected
for private dwellings. Capitalism in art also tended to revive, to a
certain extent, puritanical standards. For protective purposes, the
capitalists had adopted the puritanical notion that sin and immorality
are purely a matter of sexual behavior. Hence capitalism tended to
frown upon nudity and other forms of appeal to the senses. It was no
accident that the leader of American capitalism was also the chief finan-
cial supporter of Anthony Comstock, who is still remembered for his
suppression of "September Morn," a picture which now seems superbly
innocent.

In our day, there has been a revived interest in art and a great variety
in the forms of its expression. Modernism in art was launched by
Cezanne and van Gogh, who led the revolt against tradition and con-
vention. Modernism has extended all the way from sound realism to
such bizarre trends as Cubism. Despite the vagaries of extremists, the
works of the leading modernists, Cezanne, van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin,
Rousseau, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Manet, and Derain exhibit "true
artistic genius. Private support for art has been supplemented by an
ever increasing government subsidy. Under the Roosevelt administra-
tion various artistic enterprises were subsidized to provide work for un-
employed artists. In totalitarian states, art has been exploited as a
means of propaganda for the new regime. A new proletarian art has
arisen in Russia and Mexico which glorifies the worker in modern life.

The Growth of Art in the United States

Let us now review briefly some of the factors that have brought about
increased interest and activity in the field of art in the United States.
Colonial civilization flourished in the period before the Industrial Revolu-
tion, and the element of fine craftsmanship which was present in the
handicraft stage is evident in the furniture and metal work of colonial
times. Colonial architecture also had a severe simplicity, especially in
New England, which constituted a definite artistic trend. It has been

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 845

revived with enthusiasm in our own century. Some of the better trends
in European art, especially English art, were reproduced in the Southern
colonies. By and large, however, the more notable colonial contributions
to art were exhibited in interior decoration and in the handicraft activities
of daily life. The country was relatively poor, and the Puritanism which
prevailed in many of the colonies was antagonistic to art.

Nor did the appreciation and exploitation of beauty make much head-
way in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. Our isolation
from Europe after the War of 1812 brought a repudiation of English as
well as most continental European cultural influences. We were a
pioneer country, and the poverty and seriousness of pioneer life led to the
idea that art is an effeminate waste of time on trivialities. As industrial
expansion set in, we became primarily absorbed in business and making
money. The remarkable growth of the evangelical religions between the
Revolutionary War and the Civil War gave a new impetus to Puritanism.
The latter was strongly opposed to art as a manifestation of the sensuous
and the sinful. The middle of the century was notable as the period of
the flowering of democracy, and democracy, born in part on the frontier,
looked askance at the refinement which art expresses and encourages.
The destruction of Southern culture by the Civil War was a serious blow
to art. Though some writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson raised their
voices against the anti- aesthetic trends in American culture, they were
not able to make much headway against such tendencies in American
life.

Nevertheless, the United States did make certain important contribu-
tions to artistic life in this period. Major Charles Pierre L 'Enfant
brought over Continental ideas of architecture and city planning and
laid out plans for the new capitol at Washington, as well as for a number
of public buildings and private homes. Thomas Jefferson combined
Renaissance and classical styles at Monticello, the University of Vir-
ginia, and the state capitol at Richmond. The architect Charles Bui-
finch (1763-1844) has been called the Christopher Wren of the United
States. He introduced Renaissance architectural styles into this country
in such buildings as the original State House in Boston. There was a
widespread imitation of classical Greek architecture in this country as a
result of the influence of Benjamin H. Latrobe (1764-1820), who was
once described as "the man who brought the Parthenon to America in his
gripsack." An excellent example of this type of architecture is the
Treasury Building in Washington.

Musical appreciation and some musical performance got under way
before the end of the Civil War. The Handel and Haydn Society was
founded in Boston in 1815, and this and other choral societies promoted
an interest in vocal music. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra was
founded in 1842. The first grand opera was performed in New York in
1825, and an opera house was built there in 1833. The Boston Academy
of Music, opened in the same year, launched capable musical instruction.
Distinguished foreign artists, such as Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Adelina

846 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Patti, were warmly welcomed. Towards the end of this period Stephen
Foster composed his immortal American folksongs.

For a time after the Civil War artistic tastes seemed to grow worse.
We had a generation of mushroom millionaires, with a great urge for
display, unrestrained by taste and unguided by education. The country
was flooded with the new machine products of which we were so proud at
the time. We even insisted on bringing in atrocities from England, like
the Eastlake and Queen Anne houses. This was the nadir period, known
as "the Black Walnut" or President Grant era.

In the 'seventies and 'eighties, however, there was a slow awakening of
interest in art in this country. The new leisure class of wealthy busi-
nessmen and bankers, in spite of their frequent bad taste, helped to endow
art by founding a number of art museums and subsidizing such worthy
institutions as the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York Phil-
harmonic Society. Their private art collections also gave some favorable
publicity to artistic interest. One of the greatest of American architects,
Henry H. Richardson (1838-1886), did his work in this period. He
revived interest in Romanesque styles, well illustrated by Trinity Church
in Boston. The other outstanding architect of the day was Richard
Morris Hunt (182&-1895), who inclined towards French Renaissance
styles and is best known for building magnificent homes for the new
millionaires of the period, the Tribune Building in New York, the Fogg
Museum at Harvard, and the Capitol extension in Washington. Charles
Eliot Norton (1827-1908) took a chair in the history and theory of art
at Harvard in 1875 and had great influence in promoting art education
and in making it a respectacle department of higher learning. When
the Roeblings built the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, they showed
that engineering enterprise could produce a work of beauty as well as of
utility.

The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, gave a great
impetus to the popular appreciation of art. It brought together such
able architects as Richard M. Hunt, Charles F. McKim, Stanford White,
Louis Sullivan, Daniel H. Burnham, and Charles B. Atwood. They
designed many of the important buildings in artistic fashion. The
classical style dominated, and perhaps the best piece of designing was
done by Atwood for the Palace of Fine Arts. Burnham later had a great
deal of influence on the artistic renaissance in the Midwest through his
work on the Chicago planning commission.

As the wealthy grew richer, they devoted more of their riches to the
collection and support of art. Led by Andrew Carnegie, they continued
to establish and endow art museums and galleries. They brought over
millions of dollars worth of European art treasures. The lack of true
artistic sensibilities on the part of some of them is well-illustrated by the
annoyed surprise of Senator William Clark of Montana, the copper king,
when the Dresden Museum refused to sell him the Sistine Madonna at
any price they pleased to name.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 847

The marked increase in immigration from southern Europe, especially
from Italy, provided a new element in our population which was tradi-
tionally devoted to every form of artistic expression. This laid the basis
for greater popular interest in art in generations to come. •

The turn of the century brought with it a sort of outburst of American
art, unprecedented in our history. This was the product of a combination
of European influences and new internal developments, such as we have
described above. Richardson, Hunt, and their leading successors in
architecture were trained abroad. The immigrant influence was im-
portant. The Chicago Fair galvanized the new artistic impulses. Louis
Sullivan established a new school of architecture which provided an
unprecedented fusion of utility and beauty. It was Sullivan's basic dic-
tum that form should follow function in architecture.4611 He created the
first modern office building of real distinction. Sullivan and Cass Gilbert
also transformed the new skyscraper architecture into works of art. One
of the first great triumphs in the field was the Woolworth Building, de-
signed by Gilbert.

The mam American achievements in painting during this period were
in the field of landscape painting, in which Americans led the world.
Probably the ablest of our landscape painters was George Innes, but
others like Winslow Homer and Alexander Wyant did highly competent
work. Excellent portrait painting was done by the expatriate John
Singer Sargent and by Abbot Thayer and George Bellows, among others.
John La Farge and Edwin Abbey produced creditable mural decoration,
and Frederick Remington and Charles Dana Gibson led in brilliant illus-
tration. In the field of sculpture, the genius of the period was Augustus
Saint-Gaudens (184&-1907), America's greatest sculptor, known for such
masterpieces as the statue of "Grief" in the Rock Creek cemetery in
Washington and the Shaw Memorial in Boston.

American interest in music grew during this period, and substantial
contributions were made to musical composition. The fame of the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra grew under its able conductor,
Theodore Thomas. Leopold Damrosch founded the New York Sym-
phony Society in 1881, and most of the other large American cities fol-
lowed suit before the end of the century. German choral societies stimu-
lated the interest in vocal music. Competent composers appeared in the
persons of Edward A. McDowell, Dudley Buck, John K. Paine, Horatio
Parker, Arthur Foote, and G. W. Chadwick. John Philip Sousa popu-
larized band music and contributed many compositions of his own.
Foreign artists were welcomed in greater numbers, especially in grand
opera, and better facilities were created for musical instruction.

In the period since the first World War, artistic interest and activity

46a On Sullivan and the Chicago school of architecture, which also included William
L. Jenney and John Root, see Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture,
Harvard University Press, 1941.

848 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

have been further increased. As the United States became richer, we
imported even more of the European art treasures than in early decades.
It has been estimated that the objects of art now in private and public
collections in the United States are worth approximately 2 billion dollars,
if their value can be measured in money. More and more of these art
treasures are being given to public museums. It is estimated that, in the
year 1931 alone, the art gifts to the public amounted to more than 135
million dollars. Art education assumed a new importance and the great
foundations have given ever more liberally to promote the study and
appreciation of the arts. The revival of interest in the Colonial period
and the restoration of Williamsburg, Va., by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
have stimulated our appreciation of early American art and architecture.

The influence of the government has been favorable to artistic activity.
Especially notable here have been the various art projects subsidized by
the Roosevelt Administration. City planning has made marked head-
way. The most notable achievement here ha& been the astonishing work
of Robert Moses on the parks and parkways of Greater New York. The
World Fairs in Chicago in 1933 and 1934 and in New York in 1939 and
1940 did much to acquaint the public with modern trends in art. But it
was no less than a national scandal that the foremost architect of our day,
Frank. Lloyd Wright, was not employed to contribute designs to the
New York exposition.

Even business and industry have made their contribution to the arts.
The New York city zoning law introduced the "set-back" style in sky-
scraper architecture, good examples of which are the New York Telephone
Building designed by Ralph Walker and the Hotel Shelton designed by
Arthur Harmon. The evolution of the automobile in the last two decades
well illustrates the evolution of artistic considerations in industry and
engineering. Modernistic furniture has shown how artistry and effi-
ciency may be combined in objects of utility. The movies and the radio
have helped to popularize art and music. Greater emphasis upon the
manual arts in education is working, though unconsciously and often
in awkward fashion, towards the ideal expressed by Ruskin and Morris.
' There was important progress in American art between the two World
Wars. In architecture, the main developments were the further expan-
sion of skyscraper architecture and the extension of modern trends in
every field, even into ecclesiastical architecture. In the skyscraper field,
the influence af Sullivan and Gilbert continued, but Harmon, Walker,
Raymond Hood, and others took up the earlier tradition and expanded
it. Eliel Saarinen was more influential than any other in promoting
modernism in skyscraper architecture. The outstanding architect of
both America and the world in this period was Frank Lloyd Wright
(1868- ), who developed a daring functional modernism. He intro-
duced functional utility in his buildings, related the design of a given
building to its surroundings, and experimented extensively with new
building materials, especially steel and glass. He had even more influ-
ence and prestige in Europe and the Orient than in the United States,

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 849

where traditionalism was strong enough to delay recognition of his genius
for a time.46b

In painting, the landscape tradition was continued by able and original
artists, such as Rockwell Kent, who is also noted for his skill with wood-
cuts and murals. John Marin exhibited genius with his brilliantly colored
marine landscapes, mainly watercolors and miniatures. Georgia O'Keefe
captivated the discerning with her symbolic paintings of flowers. Vari-
ous American artists, such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and
Charles Demuth, flirted with various phases of modernism, but the out-
standing development in American painting in the period was to be found
in realistic and colorful murals, free from the stiffness and conventionality
of the academic school. Leaders in this class were Thomas H. Benton,
William Gropper, George Biddle, Howard Cook, and others. Mural
painting was still further "brought down to earth" and adapted to a
democratic, proletarian public in the work of two Mexicans, Diego
Rivera and Jose Orozco. Rivera is a deadly earnest apostle of the
working class, while Orozco satirizes the leisure class and their academic
servants. Alfred Stieglitz has not only raised photography to the level
of an art, but has probably been the most potent and persistent personal
force in promoting native American art and artists.

The most dramatic innovation in the appreciation of painting in the
United States between the two wars was the establishment of a respec-
table status for modernistic art in this country, almost a single-handed
achievement of Albert C. Barnes of Merion, Pennsylvania. Making a
large fortune as the discoverer of a valuable antiseptic, argyrol, he
devoted himself to the collection and promotion of modern art, of which
he -has 'by far the greatest collection in the world. His wealth, persist-
ence, and pugnacity, as well as his genius for art appreciation, enabled
Barnes to overcome, to some degree, the prejudices of the classicists and
purists and enormously to increase the standing of modern art, not only
in America but in Europe itself.47

In sculpture there were a number of able artists in this period, even
though none reached the stature of Saint-Gaudens. Perhaps closest to
the tradition of the latter is the work of Daniel Chester French. Lorado
Taft is well known for his fountains. George Grey Barnard has been
called, with good reason, the American Rodin. The leading American
eclectic was Paul Manship, best-known for his bronzes and his versatility
in decorative design. Carl Milles, a Swede, has exerted a considerable
influence upon American sculpture, especially in the design of fountains.

One of the more original achievements of the United States in the fine
arts between the two World Wars was in music. For the first time,
American composers showed more originality than Europeans. Jazz
music was perhaps the most original American contribution. It is char-

4flb;Oh Frank Lloyd Wright and his work, see H. R. Hitchcock, In the Nature of
Materials, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942.

47 See the four articles by Carl W. McCardle, "The Terrible-Tempered Dr.
Barnes," Saturday Evening Post, March 21-April 11, 1942.

850 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

acterized by emphatic syncopated rhythm, repetition, and moving emo-
tional appeal. Its sources are many and contrasting — Negro and Spanish
rhythm, melodic idioms, "blues" harmonies, and even classic harmony
and melody. Among the American composers who have combined the
conventional and the modernistic are Henry Hadley, John Alden Car-
penter, Arthur Shepherd, Deems Taylor, Philip James, and Howard
Hanson. Leading American modernists in composition have been Aaron
Copland, Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, Leo Ornstein, and William Grant
Still. George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman raised jazz to the level of an
art. Jerome Kern and Cole Porter elevated the lyric level of musical
comedy. The United States has, of late, produced able performing
artists in music, especially vocalists. The Metropolitan Opera Com-
pany has, on occasion, put on performances of European grand opera
with a full cast of American singers.

Trends in Contemporary American Art

We may now consider some developments in art and art appreciation
since the first World War. A number of agencies have furthered popular
interest in art. Prominent here have been the art museums, many of
which are under private control. The art museum acquires and assembles
objects of art, makes possible an increase in our knowledge of the history
and nature of art, and contributes to public enjoyment by making it
possible for large numbers of people to view outstanding examples of
artistic achievement. In 1890, there were 76 art museums in the country.
By 1929, they had increased to 167. Some 41 were added in the decade
from 1920 to 1929. There is an art museum in every city in the United
States with a population of 250,000 or over. The capital invested in art
museums in 1929 was approximately 60 million dollars, exclusive of art
treasures. While most of the larger museums are in the great cities of
the East, a greater per capita interest is shown in the art museums of
cities in the Middle West and the Far West. In the last two decades
much progress has been made in linking up the museums with art educa-
tion. Art classes make use of the resources and facilities of the museums,
and this tendency is encouraged by most museums.

Despite their valuable social and educational service, our art museums
have been sharply criticized for their alleged conservatism and sterility
and their lack of democratic spirit and virility. Such were the charges
made by Park Commissioner Robert Moses of New York City in the
winter of 1940-41. The American painter Thomas H. Benton presents
the extreme of critical attitudes toward our art museums:

A graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his
gait. . . . Do you want to know what is the matter with the art business in
America? It's the third sex and the museums. Even in Missouri we're full
of 'em. Our museums are full of ballet dancers, retired businessmen and boys
from the Fogg Institute at Harvard where they train museum directors and art
artists. I'd have people buy the paintings and hang them in privies or anywhere
anybody had time to look at them. Nobody looks at them in museums. Nobody

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 851

goes to museums. I'd like to sell mine to saloons, bawdy houses, Kiwanis and
Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce — even women's clubs.48

Architecture has been another important agency in bringing art before
the public. In every field of construction greater attention is being given
to artistic considerations in the erection of buildings. Frank Lloyd
Wright has done more than any other architect to urge the combination
of beauty with functional utility in the design of public buildings, busi-
ness plants, hotels and private homes. Wright and Eliel Saarinen have
even introduced highly modernistic design into church buildings in such
structures as the Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana, and the Com-
munity Church in Kansas City. Public buildings are usually designed
by skillful architects and not only their exterior but their interior, as well,
shows an increasing concern with art. Art figures more prominently
than ever before in the interior decoration of buildings. It was not so
long ago that murals of distinction were limited to a few public buildings
like the Boston Public Library or the Library of Congress. Today, even
great office buildings like Rockefeller Center have extensive mural decora-
tions. Business buildings, which formerly were all too often monstrosii
ties, are now very generally designed with an eye to artistic appeal.
Skyscrapers, in particular, have been so beautifully designed that they
have been aptly called "the cathedrals of commerce." The private dwell-
ings of the rich were once notorious for their drab monotony or their
monstrous and lavish decoration. Most of the great apartment houses
which have replaced them are far more pleasingly and artistically de-
signed. This is especially true where city planning and large housing
projects have dominated the construction picture. It is rare to find a
large ugly building of recent construction. Even factories, which were
once a blot on the landscape, are now often laid out with due considera-
tion for architectural appeal and landscaping possibilities.

It is where city planning and large building projects have been executed
that we find the fullest rein given to considerations of aesthetic appeal
and to housing utility. Since there is every probability that city plan-
ning and large scale housing developments will be far more marked in the
future than they have been in the past, we may expect much more of
an artistic impulse from such tendencies. Unless our civilization col-
lapses, there is every probability that the cities of the future will be
examples of planned beauty as well as of service and convenience.

Of all forms of art, it is probable that music has had the greatest
popular appeal since 1918. A complete revolution has been worked here
by the radio, exclusively in the last two decades. Today over 26 million
families own radio sets. While much of the radio music is the intolerably
banal crooning and commercial jazz, there is a residual element of
high-grade performance. Such is the weekly program of the New York
Philharmonic Society and the Metropolitan Opera Company, and the sus-
taining programs provided by the great broadcasting chains. In the

48 Quoted in Time, April 14, 1941, p. 70; see also Thomas Craven, "Our Decadent
Museums," in The American Mercury, December, 1941.

852 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

summer, a number of excellent programs are provided by stadium con-
certs and other community projects. Important regional music festivals
are also usually put on the air. Radio lectures on music have increased
popular musical appreciation.

Far more attention is given to music in the colleges and schools than
ever before, a matter which we shall comment upon later, in connection
with art education. There are school and college glee clubs, orchestras,
and bands. Many music contests are conducted in public schools. In
1931, it was estimated that at least 73,000 high school students played in
some form of instrumental competition. The number is much larger
today. The introduction of consolidated or centralized community
schools in rural areas has greatly facilitated the extension of musical
instruction and activities in our schools. Community singing has been
more actively promoted during thd last twenty years than ever before,
and regional music festivals are more numerous and better attended.
Both vocal and instrumental concerts of high merit are being brought to
smaller cities.

One deplorable trend in musical activity, which has been especially a
result of the radio and the phonograph, has been the marked falling off
in the amount of individual music performed in the home. For example,
by 1929, the total value of musical instruments produced in the United
States had dropped to less than one half the figure for 1925. This trend
has continued. Many professional musicians have also been deprived
of work.

The old monopoly over the drama once possessed by the legitimate
theatre has been undermined by the movies. Nevertheless, the conven-
tional theatre is by no means a dying art, though the movies have all but
destroyed the road companies, except for performances of smash hits in
the larger cities. This loss has been somewhat offset by the growth of
the little theatre movement and the summer theatre movement, which
bring a superior type of dramatic production to non-metropolitan dis-
tricts.

Among those who have made the modern theatre a work of art in
something more than the acting, the leading place must be assigned to
Edward Gordon Craig, an English-born actor and stage director. He
declared war on artificial stage-settings and scenery and insisted on
introducing realism and beauty into stage equipment. He held that a
good play must be an all-round artistic production in which actors,
musicians, and stage technicians must cooperate. Lavish spectacle plays
were introduced on the American stage by Max Reinhardt and Norman
Bel-Geddes. Conspicuous among such Reinhardt productions have been
"The Miracle" and "The Eternal Road." Others who have promoted
beauty and realism in stage decoration and management have been
Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson. Not all novelty in stage
design has been in the direction of lavishness. There have been trends
towards simplicity, as well, and some cases of extreme simplicity, as in
Orson Welles' "Caesar," and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," were well
received.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 853

It can hardly be said that the movies have elevated our artistic per-
spective and sensibilities, but they have undoubtedly increased aesthetic
appreciation on the part of the masses, many millions of whom have never
seen a legitimate drama performed by a first-class company. And some
movie productions, especially those reproducing the plays of Shakespeare,
have been works of art, not only in regard to the acting but also with
respect to the scenic settings. The animated cartoons of Walt Disney
and his productions of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and "Fan-
tasia" have notably promoted art on the screen. No doubt the total
impact of the movies has been a marked positive contribution to art
education for the masses.

Pageantry, which is perhaps the most social of the arts, has definitely
gained ground in the last two decades. Norman Bel-Geddes and Max
Reinhardt have introduced elaborate pageantry in the theatre. It is
especially exploited in portraying scenes of regional historical and cul-
tural development. Closely related is the interest created in rhythmic
dancing, in which the number of participants has increased rapidly since
the first World War. Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham,
and Doris Humphrey have been mainly responsible for introducing
naturalistic rhythmic dancing. Among other things, they studied and
adapted the dances of Egypt, India, and Greece.

World Fairs have become more frequent and more lavish. The
Chicago Exposition of 1933-34 and the New York and San Francisco
Expositions of 1939-40 did much to popularize recent artistic develop-
ments, especially in the field of modernistic architecture and furniture
and mural decoration.

Regional and racial monopoly in the field of art have been under-
mined. While the great museums and theatres in the Eastern metro-
politan centers still dominate the artistic scene in the United States, they
are now being rivaled by those in the Midwest and on the Pacific coast.
Artistic interest and achievement are now taking on a national character.
This trend has been notably forwarded by the government art projects,
and by the radio and the movies. And the artistic products of the white
race are now supplemented by those of the Negro, the American Indian,
and the Mexicans. The Negroes have been especially successful in the
field of music.

Another mode of promoting art as a social force has been the increas-
ingly artistic character of those things which touch our daily lives. The
city homes of a few generations back, even those of the rich, were for the
most part terrible to behold. Today the tendency is toward more con-
venient and sanitary housing and also more artistry in the construction
of apartments and individual dwellings. This has reached its highest
form of expression in the projects associated with city planning. Much
more attention than ever before has been given to landscaping in con-
nection with home construction. The increasing amount of suburban
life has forwarded and facilitated this development. A great deal more
care has also been given to artistic considerations inside our homes.
Electric fixtures have become more artistic as well as more efficient.

854 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Household furnishings are simpler and more beautiful. Nothing reflects
the progress of artistic interest and achievement in the home more com-
pletely than the improvement in bathroom designs and decorations. Even
kitchen stoves and sinks can now be a work of art. A modern kitchen
has contributed as much to the improved appearance of the home as it
has to increased household efficiency. Our clothes unquestionably also
reveal the progress of artistic values, though this is contaminated by the
profit motive in commercialized fashions, which often decrees bizarre
monstrosities that can make no claim to artistic merit.

Since ours is a business civilization, we cannot ignore the relation of
recent trends in business and industry to artistic considerations and
interests.

Business buildings and factories, as we have seen, are built with more
of an eye for art and beauty than ever before. Among the artist-
engineers who have helped to make factories and factory-products beau-
tiful have been Joseph Sinel, Norman Bel-Geddes, George Sakier, Henry
Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Harold Van Doren. Some business
plants, especially in suburban areas, have taken the lead in the com-
munity for architectural beauty and skillful landscaping.

Many products of industry have become ever more attractive. We
have already made reference to better housing and interior decoration
and equipment. The almost incredible improvement in automobile de-
sign has reflected artistic advance as much as anything else in our genera-
tion. Nor can we overlook the services of writers like Lewis Mumford
in stressing the possibilities of art within the modern industrial frame-
work, in such books as Technics and Civilization; The Culture of Cities;
Sticks and Stones; and The Golden Day.

Probably nothing has more directly reflected the increasing interest in
artistic appeal than competitive commercial advertising. All big com-
panies today have art directors, and advertising itself has become as
much a matter of art as of commerce. While advertising has certainly
done little to promote creative originality in art, it has surely helped to
make the masses art-conscious. Dr. Frederick P. Keppel has fairly
stated the position of commercial advertising in current artistic trends:

Granting that advertising has its full share of the general failings of our age,
plus a few special crimes of its own, one cannot escape the conviction that it is
today exercising a very powerful and, on the whole, a wholesome influence on
our aesthetic standards.40

Another phase of modern business which has made its contribution to
an increase of artistic appeal has been the publication of our leading
"class" and popular magazines. They have become ever more artistic
in layout, format, typography, illustrations, and color work. The most
notable achievements along this line have been the sumptuous magazines
like Fortune and Esquire but many less pretentious publications show a

*» Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. II, p. 978.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS sss

great aesthetic improvement over the periodicals before the first World
War.

We have been talking about the contributions of business to art; but
art has also contributed to business. Even if we exclude the radio and
the movies, the various branches of artistic activity constitute a large
financial investment and provide employment for hundreds of thousands
of persons. If we include radio and movies, it is evident that art today
constitutes a business enterprise of tremendous proportions.

The increase of interest in the field of art since the turn of the century
has not been wholly spontaneous. To a great extent, it has been pro-
moted by direct and indirect art education, though it still remains true
that artistic interest is developing more rapidly than the facilities in
formal art education.

Until the present century, there was little provision for systematic art
instruction in this country. Individual painters and musicians might
study privately under great masters at home and abroad, but there was
slight interest in systematic art education even in private schools. We
have already pointed out how Charles Eliot Norton founded art education
at Harvard in 1875, but his example was not widely imitated. In col-
leges, art was regarded, particularly by the men, as a "sissy subject"
suitable only for girls.

A strong impulse to art education in the schools grew out of the Pro-
gressive Education Movement in the elementary schools. Art education
is today generally a part of the curriculum in public schools. There has
been a marked increase in art courses in men's colleges as well as in co-
educational and women's colleges. Art is no longer regarded as effemi-
nate. The American Institute of Architects launched a strong drive in
1923 to encourage art education in the colleges. Most college art courses
still remain, however, those in the history and appreciation of art.

At the same time that general and untechnical art education in the
schools and colleges is increasing, there have also been marked gains in
professional art and music schools. In the 18 outstanding art schools of
the country, the attendance increased from 10,000 to 18,000 between
1920 and 1930. Art and music training today are less narrow and
specialized, and make an effort to provide broad all-round training.

In addition to direct education in the arts there is much indirect art
education, implicit in the artistic trends which we have already noted.
The graphic arts are brought constantly to our attention in the form of
photography, wood engraving, etching, lithography and the like. The
periodical press is an important source of indirect art education, as is
also the daily press. Art exhibitions and art lectures are a source of
competent instruction to many. Especially important are the traveling
exhibitions which bring both art treasures and current artistic productions
to small communities. The wide circulation of books on art such as
those by Hendrik Van Loon and Thomas Craven, has contributed to
popular education in this field.

Viewing artistic developments in the United States since the first World

856 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

War, one may discern not only greater interest in the arts but also a
tendency toward direct participation in creative artistic endeavor. This
important transformation is summarized by Dr. Keppel:

Taking the evidence as a whole, however, there seems no question that it
indicates a definite trend toward the belief that beauty, its creation, reproduc-
tion, its passive enjoyment has an essential place in normal human life. Today
people by the tens of thousands will look at exhibitions in museums and fairs, in
hotels and office buildings. They will listen by the millions to good music on the
radio and at the summer concert. Perhaps as many take real pleasure in the
design of articles in daily use, from safety razor to motor car, and in the play of
color and light and shade. Few relatively, but still an increasing number, do
something besides look and listen; they participate in the little theater, in school
and community orchestras, in businessmen's sketch clubs.50

Some of the outstanding tendencies in the artistic scene since the first
World War are the following: Primarily as the result of increased leisure,
art has received more attention from the public than ever before. Art
has become more dynamic and may be entering into a new period of
creation and expansion. Industry is putting out its products with an eye
for artistry as well as utility. There has never been so much concern for
design and landscaping for dwellings, office buildings, and factories. Ad-
vertising is becoming more expensive, ingenious, and artistic. The
United States is producing far more original art than ever before and is
less content to rest satisfied with merely viewing foreign masterpieces.
There has been a remarkable expansion of interest and facilities in every
phase of art education. There is an increasing amount of governmental
interest in, and support of, art. Finally, mere passivity is being sup-
plemented by a greater degree of creative participation in every field of
art.

The New Deal Art Projects

The federal government was not entirely a newcomer in the field of
art in 1935 when the WPA Art Projects were created. At the close of
the eighteenth century Major L 'Enfant, a famous French architect,
'was brought over to lay out the city of Washington. His plan was
followed roughly in the building of the city. In 1803, Jefferson appointed
Latrobe Surveyor of Public Buildings and commissioned him to carry on
work on the federal capitol. This building as it stands today is a sort
of recapitulation of the artistic history of the country. In some ways
more distinguished is the new Library of Congress with its famous murals.
A Commission of Fine Arts had been appointed in 1859, but was abolished
a year later. In 1910 a National Fine Arts Commission was provided
for, made up of seven members appointed by the President. Its func-
tion was purely advisory and it did not receive a salary.

Another example of governmental patronage of the arts is the Chamber
Music Foundation established by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and housed

5° Recent Social Trends, McGraw-Hill, Vol. II, p. 1003.

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 857

in a special hall in the Library of Congress. At the other extreme in
musical expression are the Army, Navy, and Marine bands, of which
the last is the oldest. The government also supports some national
galleries, such as that in the Smithsonian Institute and the Freer Gallery.
On the whole, however, federal support of art before 1935 was slight and
unimpressive. The gift of a great national art museum in Washington
by Andrew Mellon, together with his art treasures, was probably the
most notable private benefaction for national art interest. The museum
was opened with appropriate ceremonies in the spring of 1941.

The excursion of the federal government into the role of Art Sponsor
Number One was, like the conservation program, stimulated by the un-
employment and relief situation. It began with the creation of a small
experimental unit known as the Public Works Art Project in December,
1933. Thisv lasted until June, 1934, and gave work to about 3,000 paint-
ers and sculptors. In 1934, a Section of Painting and Sculpture was
created in the Treasury Department and employed about a thousand
artists. In October, 1938, it was changed to the Section of Fine Arts
and made permanent. The Section of Painting and Sculpture, though
ill-housed and working under considerable handicaps, did accomplish
some good work, the best of which has been put in government buildings.

But the art enterprise which attained impressive proportions was
the four Art Projects created in August, 1935, under the general super-
vision of the Works Progress Administration. These projects were the
Federal Arts Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre
Project, and the Federal Writers Project. While these projects were
under the formal supervision of Harry Hopkins, as head of WPA, the
actual- supervision was handed over to his assistant administrator, Ellen
S. Woodward. Competent directors were selected for the several Projects
by R. J. Baker, then assistant to Mr. Hopkins. Holger Cahill was ap-
pointed director of the Arts Project, Nikolai Sokoloff of the Music Project,
Hallie Flanagan of the Theatre Project, and Henry C. Alsberg of the
Writers Project.

These four art projects reached their peak in 1936, when they employed
about 42,500 persons. Some 5,330 were enrolled in the Arts Project,
15,629 in the Music Project, 12,477 in the Federal Theatre, and 6,500 in
the Writers Project. The personnel was cut rather sharply thereafter
and, by January, 1938, only 27,000 were employed. The projects tapered
off and were pretty much closed by the end of 1939. War crowded out
art in federal interests. By January, 1938, about $87,000,000 had been
expended on these projects. The revolutionary character of the federal
art enterprise has been well stated by Fortune:

What the government's experiments in music, painting, and the theatre actually
did, even in their first year, was to work a sort of cultural revolution in America.
They brought the American audience and the American artist face to face for
the first time in their respective lives. And the result was an astonishment
needled with excitement such as neither the American artist nor the American
audience had ever felt before.

858 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

Down to the beginning of these experiments neither the American populace
nor the American artist had ever guessed that the American audience existed.
The American audience as the American artist saw it was a small group of
American millionaires who bought pictures not because they liked pictures but
because the possession of certain pictures was the surest and most cheaply
acquired sign of culture. Since all pictures, to qualify, must necessarily have
been sold first for a high price at Christie's in London this audience did not do
much for American painters. The same thing was true of the American audience
as the American composer saw it. The American audience as the American com-
poser saw it was something called the concertgoer: a creature generally female
and ordinarily about sixty years of age who believed everything Waiter Dam-
rosch said and prided herself on never hearing anything composed more recently
than 1900 or nearer than Paris, France. This audience also was little help to the
American composer. From one end of the range to the other, American artists,
with the partial exception of the popular novelists and the successful Broadway
playwrights, wrote and painted and composed in a kind of vacuum, despising the
audience they had, ignoring the existence of any other.

It was this vacuum which the Federal Arts Projects exploded. In less than a
year from the time the program first got under way the totally unexpected
pressure of popular interest had crushed the shell which had always isolated
painters and musicians from the rest of their countrymen and the American
artist was brought face to face with the true American audience.51

The work of the Arts Project was varied and voluminous. Architects
were put to work on WPA building projects. Painters and sculptors
produced works that were loaned to tax-supported institutions or ex-
hibited throughout the country. Other artists were given work to do in
art education. A searching history of American decorative art before the
twentieth century, "An Index of American Design," was compiled. The
extent and variety of the accomplishments of the Arts Project through
the year 1938 are well summarized in the following paragraph from an
official bulletin:

A total of 13,458 tax-supported public institutions have received allocations
of project work for which they have contributed the material and other nonlabor
costs. On the walls of schools, hospitals, armories, and other public buildings
all over the country hang the works of project artists. A total of more than
100,000 works of art created by Works Progress Administration artists in the
fields of painting, sculpture, and graphic arts have been allocated to these
institutions. Other art workers have created 550 dioramas and models, 450,000
posters, 35,000 map drawings and diagrams, 45,000 arts and crafts objects,
350,000 photographs, 10,000 lantern slides and various types of visual aids, and
10,000 Index of American Design drawings, making a grand total of about a
million works of all kinds allocated by the project to tax-supported institutions
during the past 3 years. In addition to these allocations there are another
25,000 works circulating in traveling exhibitions throughout the country, which
will be included in future allocations. This means that for every worker now
employed on the program the public has received 200 works in creative and
applied art. Over 1,200 artists who are not producing work for allocation are
engaged in the art educational and teaching program.52

In popularizing art and carrying it to areas which had had little previ-
ous opportunity to appreciate art, the most important work of the Federal

01 Fortune, May, 1937.

^--Report on the Federal Arts Project, January, 1939, p. 5,

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 859

Arts Project was its cooperation with local communities in setting up some
62 community art centers and galleries throughout the country. By
January, 1939, over 4% million persons had visited the community gal-
leries, listened to government-paid lecturers on art appreciation or par-
ticipated in the art classes which were established. The appreciation
and enthusiasm of the communities is well demonstrated by the fact that
they themselves contributed over $300,000 to the support of these com-
munity art projects. The nature and variety of the services of these
community projects to January, 1939, were well described by Thomas (X
Parker, assistant director of the Federal Arts Project:

Like our thousands of fine libraries throughout the country, the community
art centers endeavor to reach and serve average American communities in fields
of art and its application to everyday life. There are changing exhibitions of
various types of art, both local and national, giving a fresh selection every three
weeks. There are docents and artist-teachers in constant attendance who give
to questioning visitors of all ages, races and classes a friendly and human in-
troduction to the meaning of art. There are afternoon and evening classes
ministering both to the needs of exuberant youngsters who must have an outlet
for their aburidant energy, and to the problems of adults who find a new source
of interest and service in the fine arts. There are demonstration talks in which
the processes of print-making, of fresco painting, of poster making, and sculp-
ture are removed from the mysterious technical jargon in which they have long
been veiled and brought to the understanding of Mr. and Mrs. Average American.
Thus, through the opportunity of actually seeing the artist at work, and through
carefully prepared exhibits of materials, tools and progress stages of the creation
of a work of art, people in all sections of the country are feeling the desire both
to possess art and to participate in painting, print-making, sculpture or arts and
crafts, according to their talents.53

So far as artistic achievement is concerned, the most notable work
of the Arts Project has been that done in murals and sculpture. Over
1,200 murals and mosaics have been completed and installed in public
institutions. About 1,800 works of sculpture have also been turned out
for public buildings, parks, battlefields, and other historical sites. The
demand for the products of the Arts Project by hospitals, schools, and the
like was far greater than could be supplied by the personnel of the Arts
Project. All in all, the work of the Arts Project justifies the comment
of Lawrence Coleman, the director of the American Association of Mu-
seums, to the effect that "the Federal Arts Project is one of the most im-
portant things that has happened to American art in a hundred years."

The Federal Music Project reached more Americans than any other
WPA art project. It put on more than 100,000 programs and it has
been estimated that they reached 100 million persons. The Music
Project had little opportunity to do creative work, but it did make exten-
sive u$e of interpretative artists. Director Solokoff showed that orches-
tras could produce the music of the great masters in competent fashion
without having world-famous directors. The Music Project also proved

58 Quotation from typewritten manuscript furnished to the author by the Federal
Art Project.

860 LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS

that music is more important than the names of its performers, which was
a good lesson for American musical audiences to learn. Dr. Sokoloff also
rendered an important service in giving proper attention to American
composers who have been quite generally slighted in American music.
The "Index of American Composers" prepared by the Music Project gave
us for the first time a full comprehension of the extent of American
musical composition. The educational work of the Music Project was
also impressive. In December, 1936, over 200,000 persons were enrolled
in music classes, with some 1,300 qualified musicians as teachers. Classes
were held everywhere from metropolitan slum districts to the most re-
mote reaches of rural America.

The Federal Theatre Project also attained great popularity. Over
1,700 performances were given between February, 1936, and January,
1938. They were played before audiences that totaled over 30,000,000
persons. It is estimated that at least half of those who attended these
performances had never before seen an actor on the stage. Perhaps the
outstanding performance was the play "The Living Newspaper." Other
important plays were "Prologue to Glory/' "Triple-A Plowed Under,"
"One Third of a Nation/' and "It Can't Happen Here," which was barred
from the movies. The marionette shows in New York City and else-
where were viewed by at least 5 million school children.

In addition to its dramatic performances, every Federal Theatre group
in the country offered courses in dramatic art to train actors for more
competent performance. All in all, one may safely say that the Federal
Theatre represented the most remarkable renaissance of the legitimate
stage since it was challenged by the rise of the movies.

The most important work of the Federal Writers Project was the
"American Guide Series/' admirable handbooks of practical information
on each of the forty-eight states and Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.
Guides were also prepared for certain important American cities. Sup-
plemental volumes on folklore, local culture, and racial groups were pre-
pared. Sponsors put up over $400,000 for these guides.

Closely related to the Writers Project was the Historical Record Sur-
vey, which made a careful record of documents in public offices, libraries,
and historical association files.

There has been much criticism of the fact that over 100 million dollars
was spent on the various Federal Art Projects. But it is doubtful if any
public money was more fruitfully expended. One of the greatest defi-
ciencies in our national culture has been our backwardness in the field of
art. The Federal Art Projects constituted an impressive, if temporary,
effort to remedy this deficiency. The total cost was less than the cost of
two great modern battleships.

That we have a long road to travel before we appreciate the true value
of art in American life is evident from the fact that one of the first things
to be dismantled in the economy drive of 1939 were the Federal Art
Projects. And the very people who most bitterly criticized these expend-
itures were the ones who most enthusiastically supported the expenditures

LEISURE, RECREATION, AND THE ARTS 861

of billions for the armaments which may ultimately destroy any civiliza-
tion capable of appreciating art.

American states have not done so much to subsidize art projects as have
the American municipalities, which appear to be increasing the extenl
of their support. In 1823 the Brooklyn Museum was founded and haj
been supported by taxation. The St. Louis Art Museum, founded in th(
'seventies, is also supported by taxation. The Metropolitan Museum o:
Art in New York City receives large municipal appropriations. Othei
important museums and galleries which get aid from taxation are th(
Detroit Institute of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Newark City An
Museum, the DeYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco, city gal-
leries in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, and San Diego, the galleries
in San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas, Texas, the galleries in Indianapolis
Evansville, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the civic galleries in Buffalo
Albany, and Yonkers. There are other publicly supported museums anc
galleries but these are the more important ones.

Baltimore and San Francisco are the two cities that support municipa
symphony orchestras. The Baltimore Symphony was established ir
1916; that of San Francisco in 1935. We read about civic opera com-
panies in various American cities, but, almost without exception, thes<
are privately supported. The first municipal grant for an opera in the
United States was made by Philadelphia in 1923, but the move was pre-
mature, as there does not seem to be enough demand for opera as yd
to warrant public financing.

Government aid to the arts is heartily to be welcomed, so long as ii
does not assume to dictate artistic standards and coerce individual artist*
in their creative activity. Indeed, public support of art, along with th<
preservation of freedom, is an indispensable phase of any true civilization

Whether the state's participation in the affairs of art is a power for evil o:
for good may depend, first of all upon the degree of liberality inherent in th<
form of government itself. Second, it is in large part a matter of the direc
administering of the art activities. In a democracy, a sensible and just ar
administration is not beyond the limits of possibility; indeed, it is well withii
the range of hope.

It is important, however, that the permanent fine arts system now definite!)
in the making in our country, avoid prescribing the policies or usurping the ar
activities of the nation ; that the government provide a center for tne arts, bui
leave ample opportunity for independent effort outside; that it strive to keej
the product of the country's creative workers free from the label, "governmeni
art.'f ...

The problem of "government interference," as it may accompany state subsidy
of the arts, was once discussed by the late John Drinkwater in connection wit!
the moot question of England's national theatre. His epigrammatic conclusion
which might serve as a motto for any government in its relationship to art wai
simply this: "The state should pay the piper, but should not call the tune."5

64 Grace Overmyer, Government and the Arts, Norton, 1939, pp. 216-217. For i
good discussion of the effect of the two World Wars on recreation and the arts, se<
R. B. Fosdick, "Leisure Time in the Army and Navy," in Survey Graphic, June, 1942

CHAPTER XX
Summary Appraisal of Our Institutional Crisis

LET us gather together the main threads of the argument we have
presented in this book. We made it clear, at the outset, that social organ-
ization is an outgrowth of the natural sociability of mankind and indis-
pensable for the development of human culture. In spite of his superior
intelligence, man, in isolation, is a relatively weak and helpless animal.
In association with his fellowmen, however, he finds strength for defense
and for dynamic achievements. Through cooperative endeavor, social
groups have brought about division of labor and industrial specializa-
tion. These facilitate the provision of the necessities of life and help
to create a surplus, thereby making possible further achievements in
cultural evolution. Moreover, group life has enabled man to use the
special talents of individual members. As culture develops, social or-
ganization becomes more complex, and, if the society is an efficient one,
its growing social complexity contributes to further progress.

The advantages of group life and social organization are not obtained
without a price. This price is the discipline imposed upon the individual
by the group and the loss of liberty which this involves. For a long
time in the experience of mankind, the question of group discipline was a
purely automatic and spontaneous affair. There was no philosophic
reflection on the problem of how much discipline might be good for the
individual and as to how far excessive regimentation might hamper
progress. Reflection of this sort began with the Greeks. There is no
doubt that, for many thousands of years, the potential progress of the
race has been slowed down through the excessive regimentation of the
mass of mankind. The supreme problem of social philosophy is to out-
line a society which will assure just enough discipline to secure orderly
social life and yet provide enough liberty and independence to encourage
individual invention and freedom of speculation. It is easy enough thus
to state the issue theoretically, but it is desperately difficult to solve the
problem in the actual operations of mankind 'and the control of human
society.

We made it clear that institutions are the chief means by which group
life is carried on. These institutions have been built up to control the
main problems of organized existence. They have governed our rela-
tions with the supernatural world, the problems of sex and procreation,
the gaining of a livelihood, the enforcement of group discipline through
government, the transmission of folkways and knowledge from genera-

862

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 863

tion to generation, the modes of communication between groups and re-
gions, the relations between social classes, our attitudes towards strangers,
the contacts between groups, and the like. The security and well-being
of mankind depend very directly upon the efficiency of our social institu-
tions.

In their origins, institutions are rarely the product of conscious
thought or deliberate choice. They are the outcome of man's blundering
efforts to satisfy the various drives inherent in human nature. If these
efforts are successful enough to allow the group to maintain itself, they
take on a permanent character as institutions. Since primitive man
attributes causation mainly to the supernatural world, our early institu-
tions were usually regarded as of divine origin and accorded a suitable
reverence. This has made it very difficult to alter institutions, except
through the shock of war, revolution, and other violent forms of impact
on the life and culture of the group. Even after we have given up any
formal belief in the divine origin of our institutions, the vested interests
in society are able to provide rationalizations which confer a large amount
of sanctity upon our institutions and make it almost as difficult to
change them as in primitive times.

Institutions can operate efficiently only when they are in reasonable
adjustment to the basic conditions of life, especially the state of tech-
nology and industry. An acute cultural crisis always arises when insti-
tutions get out of adjustment with fundamental life conditions. If the
latter have changed markedly since the period when institutions arose,
we have a social maladjustment which bodes ill for the future of society.
This failure of institutions to keep pace with life conditions is known
among -social scientists as cultural lag. It is the foremost problem with
which organized society must cope. It is especially serious in contem-
porary times, when material conditions are changing rapidly while insti-
tutions maintain a stubborn reluctance to change with anything like
comparable rapidity and rationality.

The institutional crisis of our day is far more marked and serious than
in any earlier period in the history of mankind. In the last hundred
years, our science and technology have made more rapid strides than in
the million years preceding the middle of the nineteenth century. We
have an extremely impressive body of scientific knowledge and tech-
nological equipment. But we continue to try to control this empire
of laboratories and machines through basic institutions which were fully
developed by the time of George Washington. In many of of them there
are definite strains from the culture of the caveman. In this way, we
are veritably trying to control an airplane era by means of oxcart insti-
tutions, and the experiment is not succeeding.

In earlier days, institutions tended to keep pace with the slight body of
scientific knowledge and a handicraft technology. But today they lag
sadly behind scientific research and mechanical invention.

A vast gulf has developed between our archaic institutions and our
highly advanced science and technology. This creates the basic social

864 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

problem of our day. All of our other social problems — the waste of nat-
ural resources, starvation in the midst of plenty, the crisis in democratic
government, international enmity and war, religious disintegration, the
futility of education, the breakdown of morals, the disintegration of
family life, the crisis in property rights, the losses due to crime, mental
instability, the sense of insecurity, and the like — are primarily subordi-
nate and incidental results of the gulf between machines and institutions.
We shall solve none of these social problems satisfactorily until we bring
our institutions up to date and make them as efficient as our technology.

If we can modify our institutions so that our science and machinery
work efficiently for the benefit of mankind, a material Utopia will be
within our grasp, and we shall also be able to rid ourselves of that su-
preme menace — international war. If, however, we continue to sabotage
our new science and technology through archaic institutions, we face
inevitable economic collapse and international anarchy. Our science and
machinery are assets only if they are used wisely and efficiently. If we
continue to use them as we do today, they will only provide us with an
effective short-cut to oblivion. Mankind, very literally, has the choice
in our day between utopia and chaos. Upon our success in bringing our
institutions up to date will depend the outcome.

In treating of industry, we made it clear that most of the human effort
in getting a living before the rise of modern industrialism was bestowed
upon hunting, pastoral life, and agriculture. Our present-day industrial
and manufacturing era is a very recent episode in human evolution.
Even today, the majority of those on the planet are still engaged in
hunting, herding, or farming. Down to the Industrial Revolution, most
manufacturing activity was carried on within the home. However, there
were some central shops in ancient Babylonia, and small factories in
Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In the Middle Ages, a great deal of industry
was carried on under the supervision of the guilds and the monasteries.
The putting-out system, which became popular in early modern times,
has often been called the domestic system because it was located pri-
marily in the homes of workers. The factory system, which followed on
the heels of the Industrial Revolution, has been a very late arrival in the
evolution of manufacturing.

From the earliest stone ages to the eighteenth century of the Christian
era, the prevailing technique of production was that of handicraft meth-
ods. Man relied upon his hands and upon tools which extended his
manual power. Mechanical production began to appear in the seven-
teenth century. By the nineteenth it dominated manufacturing in civi-
lized states. The evolution of the empire of machines has passed through
three stages in modern times. First came the development of machines
for making cloth, the introduction of the steam engine for power services,
and cheaper methods of making iron and steel through the use of coke
furnaces. Next, came the rise of large-scale industry and improved
methods of factory administration. Finally, in the twentieth century,
we have witnessed the widespread introduction of electrical power, of

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 865

mass production, and automatic machinery. All of this may be the
prelude to even more striking and momentous mechanical advances.

We now have the technological equipment to produce enough food and
goods to provide everybody with a high standard of living with a minimum
of physical effort. But we have not realized any such benefit, because
our protential productivity has been curtailed and sabotaged by an eco-
nomic system which arose in the period of handicraft industry and is
consecrated to the limitation of production and linked to the economy of
scarcity. The technology of abundance cannot long coexist with a
scarcity economy and philosophy. We must either put our machines to
work directly for human service in an efficient manner or be resigned to
the collapse of both our economic order and our technological equipment.
Every year that passes gives greater evidence of the incompatibility be-
tween our technological prowess and our archaic economic ideas and
practices. Many believe that the only solution lies in handing over the
control of our economic life to trained industrial engineers, who can set
up a planned and efficient economy.

We have become so accustomed to capitalism as a method of economic
control that we are wont to imagine that it has always dominated eco-
nomic ideals and practices. As an actual matter of fact, it is a product
of modern times and was not highly developed until the nineteenth cen-
tury. Greek and Roman philosophers were highly critical of even rudi-
mentary capitalistic ideals and practices. Medieval church ethics prac-
tically outlawed them. They did not become popular until the rise of
Protestantism. Even then, it required a couple of centuries to accumu-
late enough financial reserves and to develop enough commercial enter-
prise to give capitalism a firm foothold in the modern economic order.
Capitalism may have its virtues or defects, but it can scarcely be re-
garded as a universal institution, coexistent with the entire economic
experience of mankind.

We traced the various stages through which capitalism has developed.
It started out as commercial capitalism, under the leadership of the mer-
chant classes, after the discovery of America and the expansion of Europe.
The coming of machinery and the factory system brought into being
industrial capitalism, then controlled by the rising class of factory
owners. As factories grew larger and the great industrialists became
richer and more powerful, industrial capitalism moved on into monopoly
capitalism, with control centered in a few powerful individuals and
groups. They sought to increase profits through reducing waste, restrict-
ing output, and maintaining high prices. In the twentieth century, capi-
talism passed out of the control of industrialists, save in the case of a few
exceptions like Henry Ford, and came to be dominated by the great in-
vestment banking interests. The latter were chiefly interested in making
profits through speculative financial manipulations, often at the expense
of sound industry and trade. The excesses of this type of capitalism,
which we know as finance capitalism, brought on the great depression of
1929 and the years following.

866 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

The depression may prove the undoing of private capitalism, since the
efforts to recover from it have, almost without exception, stimulated the
growth of state capitalism or state socialism. The second World War
seems to have hastened such developments. Prior to the war, it seemed
as though economic problems might be solved by means of the so-called
"middle-way7' system, so successfully applied in Scandinavian countries
and Finland. Here, private and state capitalism were combined success-
fully with cooperative enterprise. But the strains and stresses of the
second World War seem likely to wreck this promising development and
to favor the progress of an ever more rigorous collectivism.

Perhaps the most sacred of our economic institutions is private prop*
erty. While there have been certain types of private property since
primitive times and tribal society, the rise of property to a position of
institutional sanctity is as recent a development as that of mechanical
production. Property rights and usages were strictly controlled in an-
cient pagan times and during the Middle Ages. Private property was,
in theory at least, subordinated to religious and moral conceptions of
social welfare. The sanctification of private property was a rationaliza-
tion provided by the philosophical apologists for the rise of capitalism
and industrialism. Being the spokesmen for those who accumulated the
most property, they portrayed its accumulation as a divinely-approved
process and sought to protect property against assault by proclaiming
it to be indispensable to social well-being. Their arguments possessed
some validity in early modern times. At that time, the possessors of
property dominated economic enterprise and were responsible for the
majority of economic achievements. The urge to accumulate property
then undoubtedly stimulated industrial enterprise. Property owners di-
directly controlled and managed commercial and manufacturing projects
in those days.

In recent times, the relation of property owners to economic enterprise
has changed greatly. Through the rise of corporations and holding com-
panies and the resulting ascendancy of finance capitalism, the ownership
of property had been widely divorced from the control and management
of economic enterprises. Those who own securities in our great indus-
trial concerns actually have little or nothing to do with the policies and
practices through which they are operated. Those who do control them
are frequently more interested in making money out of financial specula-
tion, at the expense of stockholders, than they are in efficient methods of
operating the plants. Property, in our economic age, has tended more
and more to become passive and parasitical. The arguments for its
sanctity become yearly more musty and more lacking in validity.

At the very moment when private property was becoming a less
dynamic factor in industrial progress, property owners and their lawyer
retainers extended the conception of property beyond all precedent, espe-
cially in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment and the "due
process of law" clause therein has permitted a reactionary Supreme Court
to confer essential sanctity upon private property. Therefore, the pow-

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 867

4 *

erful vested economic interests; in the country sought to christen their
every selfish policy and practice as property and thus to place it beyond
the reach of the law. Almost every effort to promote social reform, eco-
nomic justice, and public decency was vigorously opposed, on the ground
that it invaded the sanctity of property. Such things as the open shop,
dangerous and atrocious working conditions, dishonest weights and meas-
ures, shoddy products, exposure to mutilation and death in factories and
mines, and gigantic financial larcenies, were all defended as property
interests, and this defense was usually upheld by the supreme tribunal
of our land. Not until President Roosevelt's attack upon the Supreme
Court in the late 'thirties was this enormous extension and distortion of
property rights seriously checked. In the Old AVorld, the growth of state
capitalism and war measures have seriously restricted private property
rights.

In spite of the tremendous prestige of property rights and the stubborn
defense of property by the courts, there have been serious inroads upon
private property in recent times, even in the United States. Paradoxically
enough, the most serious undermining of property and the greatest losses
to property owners have been the result of the policies and practiced of the
great financial moguls who control our economy and have been most
active in defending property rights through the courts. The same corpo-
ration lawyers who have argued in behalf of property rights before the
courts have guided their corporate employers in those policies which have
brought billions of dollars in losses to bondholders and stockholders. It
is doubtful if the taxes imposed upon property by public agencies have
exceeded the waste and larcenies carried out by those in control of corpo-
rations at the expense of security holders, who are the chief property-
owning classes in the community.

The breakdown of private capitalism and the increase of state capital-
ism have enormously increased the taxes laid upon private property and
income. The unemployment associated with a declining capitalism has
thrown far greater expenditures upon governmental agencies, which have
had to assume responsibility for relief and employment. Further, the
greater complexities of our society have led to new governmental respon-
sibilities. All of this has increased public expenditures and made higher
taxes necessary. These restrict and lessen the amount of property that
can be accumulated by any generation and handed on to the next. The
most direct attack of our tax system upon private property probably lies
in our heavy estate and inheritance taxes. These are being ever in-
creased, and to evade them is becoming more and more difficult.

As the state intrudes more and more into economic and financial enter-
prises, the area open to private property dominion and operations is being
constantly restricted. World war is, perhaps, more menacing to private
property than any other factor in our generation. War leads to an
enormous increase in the amount of state activity, at the expense of pri-
vate property and enterprise. Less and less freedom is left to private
agencies and the profit system. Taxes become ever higher, and less and

868 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

less profits and other forms of income are available to property owners.
It is not at all unlikely that the second World War will mark the termi-
nation of the economic order which has been based primarily upon private
enterprise and devoted to the accumulation and transmission of private
property.

We traced the stages through which the public control of society by
government and politics has passed. For thousands of years, there was
little government other than that exerted by fathers in the family and
by powerful individuals in small groups of hunters and fishermen. In
the later stages of primitive society, we find a form of government based
upon blood relationship, real or alleged. This is diversely known as
gentile or tribal society. Government in this stage of human develop-
ment was vested mainly in a group of elders or chieftains, frequently
elected by tribesmen. In some cases, a chief might rise to the status of
a rudimentary king. Representative government and a considerable
amount of personal liberty usually prevailed in primitive governments.

In due time, powerful chieftains and their tribal followers were able to
overcome other tribes and to impose their power on them. When they
did so they usually created little city-states. The latter have usually
been the first definite type of civil society, in which territorial residence
and property rights, rather than kinship, real or alleged, were the domi-
nating features of political life. It was very usual for a stage of feud-
alism, based upon personal relations, rather than either kinship or
residence, to intervene between tribal society and the well consolidated
city-state. In Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome, the city-states were
the earliest historical examples of civil government. When one city-state
succeeded in conquering others, it set up a kingdom or, if more successful
in conquest, a patriarchal empire. The culmination of ancient political
development was the Roman Empire. In the history of Rome we can
trace political evolution from tribal society through feudalism, a republi-
can city-state, and kingdoms, to the greatest empire the world ever knew
prior to the rise of the British Empire.

In the Middle Ages, we find a recapitulation of all the stages of politi-
cal evolution before the medieval period. The Middle Ages started with
tribal society. Then there were centuries of feudalism, characterized also
by an attempt to revitalize the ghost of the Roman Empire, followed by
the rise of city-states and national kingdoms.

In modern times, we come upon the rise of the national state, the most
characteristic political institution of modern society. The national state
was most frequently created by absolute monarchs out of the ruins of
feudalism. In time, the absolute monarchs were overthrown and repre-
sentative government was set up under middle-class auspices. In many
countries in the nineteenth century, a more radical and aggressive type
of government, known as democracy, was brought into being. Patriotism
and nationalistic sentiment were more vigorous in democracies than they
had been in absolute monarchies.

The national state of our day is a dual challenge to human civilization.

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 869

It has become so overgrown and top-heavy that the problems of govern-
ment have become ever more difficult to solve through democratic meth-
ods, and the resulting crisis invites the institution of dictatorship. Fur-
ther, the warlike character and bellicose patriotism of national states
constitute a special menace in our day of ever more efficient armament
and mechanized warfare.

War, under modern conditions, is economically more expensive than
ever before, and it is far more destructive to life and property. Unless
some method can be devised for peacefully resolving the disputes which
now give rise to warfare, and for creating an international army powerful
enough to curb war between national states, it seems unlikely that orderly
human civilization can endure for many more decades. Logical and
powerful federations of adjoining states may serve as the first step in
the creation of international political control.

It is thought by some that the problem of the top-heavy belligerent
national state will be solved as the result of the creation of the next stage
in political evolution. It is held that the territorial national states, based
on the representation of geographical districts, must be replaced by the
functional state, in which government will be administered by elected
representatives of vocations, professions, and occupations. This may
prove true. In fact, since the first World War there have been some
developments along the line of vocational representation.

The technique of government which has prevailed since absolutism
was supplapted by representation is what has been called party gov-
ernment. Parties have, thus far, constituted the only agency through
which representative government can be operated. While governments
have been able to exist under the party system, the latter has been
weighed down by such basic defects that party government is proving
ever more inadequate as a mode of handling the complex problems of
modern life. Though party government is supposed to be an agency of
democracy, it is fundamentally undemocratic in its organization and
operation. Parties fall under the control of machines and leaders which
become as oligarchical as any feudal oligarchy. Parties come to be oper-
ated more for the benefit of the machine and its leaders than for the serv-
ice of the public weal. Moreover, whereas the complicated problems of
modern government demand expertness and superb rationality, party
government is fundamentally anti-rational and tends to exclude experts
in favor of irresponsible and untrained rabble-rousers. The most suc-
cessful party is the one that can appeal most potently to emotions, pas-
sions, and prejudices. And a conscienceless party orator or propa-
gandist can command far more votes than the most highly trained and
public-spirited expert on government affairs. Unless vocational repre-
sentation can remedy the evils of representative government under the
party system, the world is likely to head rapidly for dictatorship, under
which there is only one party and no real party government.

Democracy is now in a most critical situation. It has already, at least
temporarily, disappeared from the majority of the countries of the world.

370 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

It worked very well in small communities in a simple agricultural society.
But it has proved incompetent and wasteful in large industrialized states.
It has been able to persist in the United States mainly because we have
been so big and rich that we could withstand, for a time, an unusual
amount of graft, corruption, and incompetence. If there is to be any hope
of democracy surviving in large states, we must introduce drastic reforms.
We must extend the civil service to cover both legislative and judicial de-
partments, as well as the administrative side of government. Only com-
petent and trained persons should be allowed to be candidates for any
public office. Some voting system must be developed which will accord
mpre voting power to an able and educated person than can be claimed
by an illiterate moron. Vocational and proportional representation must
bo introduced to provide just and efficient representative government.
Unless such reforms are introduced, there is little prospect that the demo-
cratic era will survive the present generation.

Law and legal practices are among the most important institutions of
society, and they illustrate to a rather unusual degree the fact of cultural
lag. Only orthodox religion and conventional morality are as far out
pf line with the realities of contemporary life as is the law. In many
ways, ours is a law-controlled, if not a law-made, civilization. The law-
yers occupy a place in contemporary life comparable to that held by the
medicine men in primitive society and by the theologians in the Middle
Ageg. And the law, today, has as little relation to either fact or justice
as magic in the stone age or theology in the medieval period.
. In the first place, we are swamped with an excess of overcomplicated
Jaws. There are a vast number of laws that grew out of earlier condi-
tions of society and have little relation to contemporary conditions.
Then, our legislatures have passed swarms of laws, as a result of the
growing tendency of government to interfere in all phases of modern life
and to regulate even the details of personal life. The laws themselves
are further complicated by a vast body of technical and often contra-
dictory judicial decisions and legal opinions. Not even the most learned
lawyer can be familiar with more than a small portion of extant law. If
he is honest and clear-sighted, he usually confesses that the law which he
does know has little bearing upon the facts of life which the law is sup-
posed to regulate. Legal language is an archaic and barbarous collec-
tion of technical jargon, which is far more helpful to the lawyers in con-
cealing their ignorance than it is to the cause of promoting justice or
handling contemporary realities. Yet, this jargon has taken on a quasi-
sanctified character and the most respected lawyer is the one who is
most facile in its manipulation. The average lawyer has far more respect
for the technicalities of legal procedure than he has for the administration
pf justice. The rules of legal evidence and the methods of legal procedure
are almost the reverse of the rules followed in presenting scientific evi-^
dence to establish facts.

In the execution of law today, the whole set-up favors the rich, at the
gxpense of the poor. Lawyers and judges are usually prejudiced in favor

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 871

of the vested interests of society, and only the wealthy can normally
secure legal aid competent to cope with the technicalities of law or meet
the expense of legal procedure. The technicalities and delays in the law
almost always operate in the favor of the wealthy. The poor man has
great difficulty in securing justice Jin criminal procedure and he is usually
at even more of a disadvantage in civil cases. The main exception is
where juries may, at times, be partial to poor persons who are parties to
negligence cases. But even here the advantage usually lies with the
party who can afford to hire a lawyer who is competent in "tear- jerking"
antics before a jury.

It has been said that legal practice today, outside of criminal law, falls
into the big and the little legal racket. The big legal racket is the prac-
tice of corporation law, in which the most expensive counsel available
tell corporations how they may evade the laws through which the gov-
ernment has endeavored to control their operations in the interest of
society. The main instrument used has been constitutional law, because
of the solicitude shown by constitutions and courts for the sanctity of
property and property rights. We have already seen how the remarkable
extension of property rights to cover nearly all business practices, espe-
cially corporate practices, has made it possible for great corporations to
protect themselves through appeals to constitutional law.

The little legal racket encompasses all the frantic efforts of the rank-
and-file lawyers to get enough legal business to make a living. Their
chief salvation lies in negligence cases. The coming of the automobile
has been a godsend in this respect. A goodly portion of the cases in our
courts today arise out of automobile accidents and the injuries, real or
alleged,, which come therefrom. A considerable racket has literally de-
veloped out of purely faked negligence cases, where no accident at all has
taken place. It has often been asserted by competent lawyers that, in
their mad search for business, more litigation is created by lawyers than
arises from any other single source.

Our criminal law, while superficially sophisticated and impressively
complicated, actually gets little closer to the truth and justice than the
criminal procedure of primitive peoples. The jury trial, for example, is
little more scientific or reliable than the ancient ordeal or trial by battle*
Even when justice is actually done in a courtroom, the result may be for-
feited through setting aside a verdict on the basis of hair-splitting tech-
nicalities.

Through obstructing justice and frustrating normal progress, the law
not only injures society, but also places the law itself in jeopardy. If
progress is so delayed as to bring revolution and dictatorship, conven-
tional law and legal procedure are invariably suppressed and the decrees
of the dictator are substituted therefor. Hence, the lawyers should take
warning and clean house while the opportunity still remains for them to
do so in the few democracies that are left.

One of the most novel and up-to-date aspects of our institutional life
are those techniques associated with contemporary transportation and

872 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

the communication of information. Most of these are highly novel, a
product of the last half-century or so. To a considerable extent, they
have been created on the basis of the remarkable discoveries in electro-
mechanics. Streamlined trains on railroads, automobile buses, airplanes,
and transoceanic clippers have facilitated and quickened transportation.
They have also extended and speeded up the postal service. The tele-
phone, telegraph, wireless telegraphy, the radio, the movies and television,
and the press have given us a new and impressive equipment for the trans-
mission of information. Together these have all but conquered time and
space, so far as travel and communication are concerned.

The fact that the agencies of transportation and communication have
been thoroughly commercialized has greatly extended their service to our
material life. Otherwise, they would have remained chiefly scientific
curiosities. But we have paid a price for this commercialization. The
fact th&t they have been brought under the control of business has in-
evitably meant that they reflect conventional business ideals and prej-
udices. This becomes of practical significance chiefly in connection with
the press, radio, and the movies. Our railroads and airplanes carry
radicals as well as conservatives, provided the radicals can raise the
money to pay their fares and behave themselves while on board. But
the press, radio, and the movies reveal no such hospitality to progressives,
to say nothing of radicals. With only sufficient exceptions to prove the
rule, their intellectual message reflects the economic interests which have
built them up and receive the revenue that they produce.

Thus even the agencies of communication show the incongruities grow-
ing out of the gulf between science and institutions. Perhaps the most
advanced and impressive phases of applied science, they become means
of disseminating ancient ideas and outworn institutions. Even astrology
broadcasts' have proved popular. As Clifford Kirkpatrick observes: "It
is amazing that primitive conceptions of the universe, developed some
three thousand years ago in Arabia, are spoken with greater conviction
than ever into a tiny microphone and sent winging their way into thou-
sands of homes."

Outside the dictatorships and war-regimented democracies, most of
the censorship of the agencies of communication is still voluntary, though
often very extensive. Censorship exists mainly for two purposes: (1) to
exclude progressive and radical notions which threaten the existing social
order and . (2) to exclude material, whether radical or not, that might
offend the prejudices of the mass of newspaper readers, movie fans, and
radio listeners. The result is inevitably the intellectual debasement of
the product, as well as the promotion of conservative propaganda. Be-
cause the liberal and radical attitudes are severely curtailed in the press,
movies and radio broadcasts, our agencies of communications can be
labeled anti-democratic, even though these agencies may fervently bally-
hoo a desperate world war in behalf of democracy.

In their general cultural effects, we may readily concede that modern
agencies of communication have greatly enriched the material available

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 873

to the common man. But the efforts to get mass appeal, and thereby
realize the maximum profits, have suppressed artistic originality and any
spirit of intellectual adventure.

The lesson of revolution and dictatorship abroad should be clear enough
to those who control our agencies of communication so that they can liter-
ally read it while running. If essential reforms are delayed to the point
where revolution and dictatorship are inevitable, the press, movies, and
the radio are taken over by the state and become obedient agents of dic-
tatorial propaganda. Insofar as censorship and other anti-progressive
policies on the part of these agents of communication weaken and destroy
democracy, their owners and custodians are only digging their own eco-
nomic graves. If they are wise they will mend their ways before it is
too late.

Despite the great advances in knowledge and experience in the twen-
tieth century, our culture is still weighed down with prejudices which
handicap democracy, threaten liberty, and lessen the desirable spirit of
tolerance. The main prejudices of our time are economic, in the same
way that they were religious and theological in the Middle Ages and
early modern times. They grow chiefly out of the efforts to defend and
perpetuate the capitalistic system and private property. The economic
prejudice, which arises in this fashion, colors most of the prejudices ex-
hibited in other fields, like politics, law, and the propaganda executed by
the agencies of communication. But even radical countries like Russia
have not been able to free themselves from economic prejudices which,
in such countries, take the form of anti-capitalism. In some dictatorial
> countries in Europe we have witnessed, in recent years, an amazing devel-
opment of racial prejudices which are likely to get worse before they
are subdued.

The social conflicts of our day, together with the remarkable develop-
ment of new agencies of communication, have greatly encouraged land
facilitated the growth of propaganda. This now dominates every field
of communication. Owing to the fact that the agencies of communication
are overwhelmingly in the hands of the wealthy, present-day propaganda
favors the classes rather than the masses. As we have just pointed out,
this makes contemporary propaganda overwhelmingly anti-democratic.
Since most of the information of the common man comes from this propa-
ganda, it is becoming ever more difficult for the mass of mankind to par-
ticipate intelligently in public life and democratic government.

The chief protective device against misleading propaganda is a wide-
spread knowledge of the devices of propaganda. But it is difficult to
spread any such knowledge effectively because the agencies that would
have to be used are all controlled by the propaganda mongers. Public
education should have as one of its main objects the exposure of propa-
ganda and propaganda agencies. But education itself still remains
chiefly under the control of the same social classes and forces which
disseminate reactionary propaganda through our agencies of communi-
cation. Such valuable organizations as the Institute for Propaganda

874 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

Analysis are nearly helpless in the face of the avalanche of propaganda
which overwhelms the man on the street.

Censorship threatens the free play of ideas which is essential to democ-
racy and social progress. Censorship which grows out of puritanical
prejudices is annoying and is disastrous to both art and literature. But
it is less menacing than the censorship produced by reactionary economic
forces. This latter type of censorship is what obstructs the most essen-
tial reforms and heads us towards economic collapse, revolution, dictator-
ship, and collectivism. The most extreme form of censorship is produced
by war. Now that the entire planet is being involved in war, we
face the gloomy prospect of nearly complete global censorship. It is
doubtful whether even the return of peace will put an end to a censorship
which has been so extreme and become so habitual.

We, in this country, should learn the lessons of the danger of censorship
from the experience with it overseas. If we persist in censorship to such
an extent that we prevent reforms under democratic auspices, we shall
turn the country over to a dictatorship which will censor ideas as ruth-
lessly as any in existence in the Old World.

The human family is the most basic, most ancient, and most persistent
of our institutions. The authoritarian rural family, which has dominated
the social scene in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire, is now
being undermined. There are a number of reasons for this, the most
important of which are economic. The rise of industrialism and the
growth of city life have produced a social situation vastly different from
the conditions of rural life which favored and supported the old type of
family. The city home is no longer so vital a social cell as was the rural1
home. Children are no more so great an asset as they were on the farm.
Social and recreational interests no longer center in the home. Women
can freely enter industry and the professions and are not as dependent
upon a male partner for their support. Intellectual factors also play
their part in undermining the family, most notably in the breakdown of
conventional morality and the growth of sexual enlightenment.

As the result of these new factors and forces, the old type of family
life is becoming progressively more unstable. In the United States, at
bhe present time, about one marriage in every six ends in divorce.
However, though the family may be unstable, there is no prospect that
marriage will disappear. Indeed, the marriage rate is increasing, though
not so rapidly as the divorce rate.

There is every probability that the family can adjust itself to the new
conditions of modern life. We are fairly safe in predicting that, in the
new form of family which will emerge, the mother will be more important
than she was in the period of the authoritarian rural family. It is also
fairly certain that the state will take over many responsibilities which
have been executed by the family.

A number of reforms may be suggested as means of checking the grow-
ing instability of the family. Economic reforms, which will produce an
adequate income and economic security, will do much to give cohesive*

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 875

ness to family life. The growth of sex education and adjustment will
eliminate many of the causes of divorce. Social workers and psychia-
trists can contribute much to solving problems of marital discord.

None of our institutions finds itself in a more critical situation than
does organized religion. Religion has, thus far, represented man's re-
action to a hypothetical supernatural world. The decline of belief in
supernaturalism has inevitably undermined religion. Earlier crises in
religion have not been based upon any scientific assault upon super-
naturalism. They have represented nothing more than the substitution
of one form of supernaturalism for another. It is the current scientific
questioning of the whole supernatural hypothesis which renders the re-
ligious revolution of our day so unique and so devastating.

The liberal friends of religion have endeavored to readjust religion to
the newer outlook and have sought to establish religion on a secular and
human basis. They have endeavored to make religion serve man rather
than to execute the supposed will of the gods. There is little doubt that
an enlightened secular religion, supporting social justice and world peace,
could render many important services to humanity. But it is very
difficult to get an adequate mass following for a secular religion, divorced
from any fear of a supernatural world or of the tortures of hellfire. Re-
ligious scepticism and indifference in our day unusally lead to an aban-
donment of all forms of religious interests.

Far more menacing to religion today than scientific scrutiny or scepti-
cal assault is the intervention of the new secular interests which tend to
crowd out the attention formerly given to religion. The automobile, the
movies, the radio, golf, commercialized sports, and the like, have done
more to produce religious indifference among the masses than all the
results of scientific research and all the attacks of sceptics.

Many believe that a substitute for the old supernatural religion will be
found in new economic and political cults. It is readily apparent that
Bolshevism in Russia and Fascism in Germany and Italy have many
affinities with the older religious emotions and practices. Service clubs
have taken on a quasi-religious cast in this country.

Since the older morality is directly linked with supernatural religion,
the decline of the latter has naturally undermined the conventional moral
codes which rested upon a supernatural basis. It is now difficult to pro-
mote good behavior solely through an appeal to the fear of the gods or
the penalty of damnation in the world-to-come. But the complicated
nature of contemporary life creates a greater need than ever for a sound
moral code. It is evident to all enlightened students of ethics that such
a moral code must be erected on secular foundations. It must grow out
of prolonged and profound research into the nature of man and his
social obligations. The current mental hygiene program is generally
believed to represent the best substitute at hand for the old supernatural
morality, and to point the way to the type of studies and attitudes upon
which we must rely for the creation of an adequate code of secular
morality.

876 APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

Education offers the only possibility of bringing about social change
in orderly fashion without running the risk of violence and revolution.
Unfortunately, education today is not adapted to execute this responsi-
bility. We have made education available for the masses, but we have
not adapted the content of education to the realities of modern life. We
go on with a curriculum which was designed to train children in the
declining days of feudalism. We seem to think that such subject matter
will prepare people to run a twentieth-century democracy. We are
shocked when it fails to do so.

Our elementary and grammar schools are clogged with archaic material
and make too little allowance for mental differences in children. Our
high schools train pupils to enter college rather than to enter life. Our
colleges and universities are hampered by the fact that we have the same
institutions and instruction for the mass of students, who go to college as
a matter of fad and fashion, and for the able and serious few who go to
college to get an education.

Education cannot guide social change until we give far more attention
to the social studies and teach them much more realistically. To do so
safely, teachers will be compelled to organize to assure stability of tenure.
Owing to the seriousness of the social crisis which is upon us, many believe
that the only hope of using education to direct social change lies in an
enormous extension of adult education. Some feeble steps are being
taken to promote this movement.

Our new empire of machines has, for the first time, now made possible
leisure and security. If we use these machines wisely and efficiently in
the service of society, we shall be able to get on what Plato described as
the supra-pig level of culture and to create a truly human civilization.

One of the most important fields of social science in the future must be
that devoted to a scientific study of leisure. We must know the full im-
plications of leisure and how to cultivate it most effectively for the good
of the human race. Otherwise, our increased leisure may only result in
degeneracy and confusion.

An important phase of leisure-time activity is play or recreation. Play
has become enormously diversified and extremely popular. As the result
of various social agencies, it is now more efficiently administered and
supervised. But, even yet, recreational facilities are miserably inade-
quate for those who dwell in city slums and in rural regions. Under the
influence of the profit sysem, play has been thoroughly commercialized; it
constitutes a phase of American big business. The invention and ex-
ploitation of the automobile has been the most important factor in the
extension of recreation in recent times.

If we cultivate leisure in a civilized fashion, we must make far greater
provision for the popular appreciation of art and participation in it. Art
must enter definitely into the life of the whole people. It must no longer
remain an exhibition for the favored few. The movies and the radio have
done much of late to popularize interest in the arts, especially music.

Especially important and promising has been the government support

APPRAISING OUR INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS 877

of art in revolutionary countries and in the United States under the
Roosevelt administration. The latter has done more than anything else
to bring art directly to the people of our country. But the expenditures
for art have been the merest triviality compared with what will be neces-
sary to make art a vital factor in modern life.

We may conclude with a theme that has oft been repeated in this
book; namely, that our social institutions are in a most critical period,
owing to the great gulf between them and our material culture. Until we
close this gulf by bringing our institutions up to date, there will be no
hope of solving our social problems. Indeed, our whole civilization will
remain in grave jeopardy. The present total and global war has already
placed it in a state of unprecedented fluidity and uncertainty. We may
well close with a recent pronouncement of the British Labor Party:

The Labour Party asks that we register now, as a nation, our recognition
that this war has already, socially and economically, effected a revolution in the
world as vast, in its ultimate implications, as that which marked the replacement
of Feudalism by Capitalism. All over the world, the evidence is abundant that
this revolution has deeply affected men's minds; our central problem is to dis-
cover its Appropriate institutions, above all, if we can, to discover them by
consent.

Selected References

Selected References

* Note : Publisher and date are given only in the first listing of any book.

CHAPTER 1

Atteberry, G. C., Auble, J. L., and Hunt, E. F., Introduction to Social Science,
2 vols., Macmillan, 1941.

Ballard, L. V., Social Institutions, Appleton-Century, 1936.

Balz, A. G. A., The Basis of Social Theory, Knopf, 1924.

Barnes, H. E., An Economic History of the Western World, Harcourt, Brace,
1938.

, History of Western Civilization, 2 Vols., Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

/ Sociology and Political Theory, Knopf, 1924.

, The Twilight of Christianity, Vanguard, 1929.

Boodin, J. E., The Social Mind, Macmillan, 1939.

Bossard, J. H. S., cd., Man and His World, Harper, 1932.

Bristol, L. M., Social Adaptation, Harvard University Press, 1915.

Burgess, E. W., ed., Personality and the Social Group, University of Chicago
Press, 1929.

Chapin, F. S., Cultural Change, Appleton-Century, 1928.

Coker, F. S., Organismic Theories of the State, Columbia University Press, 1910.

Coolcy, C. H., Human Nature and the Social Order, Scribner, 1902.

: , Social Organization, Scribner, 1909.

, Social Process, Scribner, 1918.

Dixon, R. B., The Building of Cultures, Scribner, 1928.

Dorsey, J. M., The Foundations of Human Nature, Longmans, 1935.

Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society (translated by George Simp-
son), Macmillan, 1933.

Eldridge, Seba, Political Action, Lippincott, 1924.

Ellwood, C. A., Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects, Appleton-Century, 1914.

, The Psychology of Human Society, Appleton-Century, 1925.

Faris, Ellsworth, The Nature of Human Nature, McGraw-Hill, 1937.

Folsom, J. K., Culture and Social Progress, Longmans, 1928.

Gesell, Arnold, Wolfchild and Human Child, Harper, 1941.

Giddings, F. H., The Elements of Sociology, Macmillan, 1898.

Groves, E. R., Personality and Social Adjustment, Longmans, 1923.

, An Introduction to Sociology, Longmans, 1928.

Hankins, F. H., The Racial Basis of Civilization, Knopf, 1926.

Hart, Hornell, The Science of Social Relations, Holt, 1927.

Hertzler, J. 0., Social Institutions, McGraw-Hill, 1929.

Hetherington, H. J. W., and Muirhead, J. H., Social Purpose, Allen & Unwin,
1918.

Hobhouse, L. T., Social Development, Holt, 1924.

, Social Evolution and Political Theory, Columbia University Press,

1913.

881

882 SELECTED REFERENCES

Jenks, Edward, The State and the Nation, Button, 1919.

Keller, A. G., Man's Rough Road, Macmillan, 1932.

Kropotkin, Peter, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Knopf, 1925.

Lurnley, F. E., Means of Social Control, Appleton-Century, 1925.

Maclver, R. M., Society: Its Structure and Changes, Farrar & Rinehart, 1936.

, Community: A Sociological Study, Macmillan, 1917.

Mackenzie, J. S., Introduction to Social Philosophy, Glasgow, 1895.
Martin, E. D., The Behavior of Crowds, Harper, 1920.
Mecklin, J. M., Introduction to Social Ethics^ Harcourt, Brace, 1920.
Monroe, Paul, A Textbook in the History of Education, Macmillan, 1912.
Miiller-Lyer, Franz, The History of Social Development, Knopf, 1921.
Ogburn, W. F., and Nimkoff, M. F., Sociology, Houghton Mifflin, 1940.
Panunzio, Constantino, The Major Social Institutions, Macmillan, 1939.
Ricgel, R. E., ed., Introduction to the Social Sciences, 2 Vols., Appleton-Century,

1941.

Robinson, T. H., et al., Men, Groups and the Community, Harper, 1940.
Ross, E. A., Social Control, Macmillan, 1901.

, Social Psychology, Macmillan, 1908.

, Principles of Sociology, Appleton-Century, 1920.

Sait, E. M., Political Institutions, Appleton-Century, 1938.

Schmidt, E. P., ed., Man and Society, Prentice-Hall, 1938.

Storck, John, Man and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

Thomas, Franklin, The Environmental Basis of Society, Appleton-Century, 1925.

Zanc, J. M., The Story of Law, Ives, Washburn, 1927.

Zimmermann, E. W., World Resources and Industries, Harper, 1933.

CHAPTER 2

Allport, F. H., Institutional Behavior, Duke University Press, 1933.

Ballard, Social Institutions.

Jiarnes, H. E., History of Western Civilization.

Barnes, H. E., and Becker, Howard, Social Thought from Lore to Science, 2 Vols.*

Heath, 1938.

Campbell, C. M., Human Personality and the Environment, Macmillan, 1934.
Chapin, Cultural Change.

- ~, Contemporary American Institutions, Harper, 1935.

Cole, G. D. H., Social Theory, Stokes, 1920.

Cooley, Social Organization.

Dampier-Whetham, W. C. D., A History of Science, Macmillan, 1930.

Davie, M. R., The Evolution of War, Yale University Press, 1929.

Dorsey, The Foundations of Human Nature.

Dunlap, 0. E., The Story of Radio, Dial Press, 1935.

Edman, Irwin, Human Traits, Houghton Mifflin, 1920.

Ellwood, C. A., Cultural Evolution, Appleton-Century, 1927.

Faris, The Nature of Human Nature.

Fosdick, R. B., The Old Savage in the New Civilization, Doubleday, Doran, 1929.

Gardner, Helen, Art through the Ages, Harcourt, Brace, 1926.

Goldenweiser, Alexander, Robots or Gods, Knopf, 1931.

Gore, Charles, ed., Property: Its Rights and Duties, Macmillan, 1922.

Haddon, A. C., Evolution in Art, Scott, 1895.

Hamilton, Walton, "Institutions," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

SELECTED REFERENCES 883

Hertzler, Social Institutions.

Hibben, Thomas, The Sons of Vulcan, Lippincott, 1940.

Jenks, The State and the Nation.

Jennings, H. S., The Biological Basis of Human Nature, Norton, 1930.

Judd, C. H., The Psychology of Social Institutions, Macmillan, 1926.

Keller, A. G., Societal Evolution, Macmillan, 1931.

, Man's Rough Road.

Laguna, T. de, The Factors of Social Evolution, Crofts, 1926.

Lang, P. H., Music in Western Civilization, Norton, 1941.

Lee, Joseph, Play in Education, Macmillan, 1915.

Lowie, R. H., Primitive Society, Boni & Liveright, 1920.

Marshall, L. C., The Story of Human Progress, Macmillan, 1925.

McMurtie, D. C., The Book, Covici-Friede, 1937.

Monroe, Textbook in the History of Education.

Montross, Lynn, War through the Ages, Harper, 1940.

Moore, G. F., A History of Religion, 2 Vols., Scribner, 1919.

Morgan, L. H., Ancient Society, Holt, 1877.

Miiller-Lyer, History of Social Development.

Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

Nef, Karl, An Outline of the History of Music, Columbia University Press, 1935.

Ogden, C. K., The Meaning of Psychology, Harper, 1926.

Panunzio, Major Social Institutions.

Robinson, J. H., The Human Comedy y Harper, 1937.

Robinson, Victor, The Story of Medicine, Boni, 1931.

Rugg, Harold, The Great Technology, Day, 1933.

Schoen, Max, Human Nature, Harper, 1931.

Schwesinger, G. C., Heredity and Environment, Macmillan, 1933.

Stern, B. J., Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist, University of Chicago

Press, 1931.

Strecher, E. A., and Appel, K. E., Discovering Ourselves, Macmillan, 1931.
Sumner, W. G., Folkways, Ginn, 1907.

Sumner and Keller, The Science of Society, 4 Vols., Yale University Press, 1927.
Tansley, A. G., The New Psychology, Dodd, Mead, 1920.
Thomas, The Environmental Basis of Society.

Thorndike, E. L., Human Nature and the Social Order, Macmillan, 1940.
Todd, A. J., Theories of Social Progress, Macmillan, 1918.
Vagts, Alfred, The History of Militarism, Norton, 1937.
Warden, C. J., The Evolution of Human Behavior, Macmillan, 1932.
Webster, H. H., Travel by Air, Land and Sea, Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
Wells, F. L., Pleasure and Behavior, Appleton-Century, 1924.
Willson, Beckles, The Story of Rapid Transit, Appleton-Century, 1903.
Winston, Sanford, Culture and Human Behavior, Ronald Press, 1933.
Woodworth, R. S., Dynamic Psychology, Columbia University Press, 1918.

CHAPTER 3

Ballard, Social Institutions.

Barnes, H. E., Can Man Be Civilizedf Brentano, 1932.

, Society in Transition, Prentice-Hall, 1939.

Beard, C. A., ed., Whither Mankind? Longmans, 1929.
, Towards Civilization, Longmans, 1930.

884 SELECTED REFERENCES

Borsodi, Ralph, This Ugly Civilization, Harper, 1933.

Bossard, J. H. S., Social Change and Social Problems, Harper, 1938.

Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution, Day, 1941.

Case, C. M., Social Process and Human Progress, Harcourt, Brace, 1931;

Chapin, Cultural Change.

Chase, Stuart, Men arid Machines, Macmillan, 1929.

Crawford, M. D. C,, The Conquest of Culture, Greenberg, 1938.

Dixon, The Building of Cultures.

Edwards, L. P., The Natural History of Revolution, University of Chicago Press,

1927.

Ellwood, Cultural Evolution.

Fodor, M. W., The Revolution Is On, Houghton Miffllin, 1940.
Fosdick, The Old Savage in the New Civilization.
Gilfillan, S, C., The Sociology of Inventions, Follett, 1935.

, Social Effects of Inventions, Government Printing Office, 1937.

Goldenweiser, Robots or Gods.

Hart, Hornell, The Technique of Social Progress, Holt, 1931.

Hertzler, Social Institutions.

, Social Progress, Appleton-Century, 1928.

Huberman, Leo, Man's Worldly Goods, Harper, 1936.
Keller, Societal Evolution.

, M an's Rough Road.

Loeb, Harold, Life in a Technocracy, Viking Press, 1933.
Lynd, R. S. and H. M., Middletown, Harcourt, Brace, 1926.

, Middletown in Transition, 1937.

Lynd, R. S., Knowledge for What? Princeton University Press, 1939.
Mannheim, Karl, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Harcourt, Brace,

1940.

Marshall, L. C., The Story of Human Progress, Macmillan, 1925.
Mumford, Technics and Civilization.
Ogburn, W. F., Social Change, Huebsch, 1922.

, Sociology.

Panunzio, The Major Social Institutions.

Randall, J. H., Our Changing Civilization, Stokes, 1929.

Robinson, The Human Comedy.

Rugg, The Great Technology.

Sims, N. L., The Problem of Social Change, Crowell, 1939.

Smith, J. R., The Devil of the Machine Age, Harcourt, Brace, 1931.

Sorokin, P. A., The Sociology of Revolution, Lippincott, 1925.

Stamp, Josiah, The Science of Social Adjustment, Macmillan, 1937.

Thornton, J. E., ed., Science and Social Change, Brookings Institution, 1939.

Todd, Theories of Social Progress.

Udmark, J. A., The Road We Have Covered, Modern Age, 1940.

Wallis, W. D., Culture and Progress, McGraw-Hill, 1930.

Warden, C. J., The Emergence of Human Culture, Macmillan, 1936.

CHAPTER 4

Ashley, P. W. L., Modern Tariff History, Dutton, 1920.

Barnes, Economic History of the Western World.

Baxter, W. J., Chain Store Distribution and Management, Harper, 1931.

Beard, Miriam, A History of the Business Man, Macmillan, 1938.

SELECTED REFERENCES 885

Bent, Silas, Slaves by the Billion, Longmans, Green, 1938.

Birnie, Arthur, An Economic History of the British Isles, Crofts, 1936.

Boissonnade, Prosper, Life and Work in Medieval Europe, Knopf, 1927.

Bowden, Witt, Industrial Society in England toward the End of the Eighteenth
Century, Macmillan, 1925.

Bruck, W. F., Social and Economic History of Germany, 1888-1988, Oxford,
Press, 1938.

Burlingame, Roger, March of the Iron Men, Scribner, 1938.

, Engines of Democracy, Scribner, 1940.

Carcopino, Jerome, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Yale University Press, 1940.

Clapham, J. H., The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-191^
Macmillan, 1923.

, and Power, Eileen, eds., The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, Mac-
millan, 1941.

Clough, S. B., and Cole, C. W., The Economic History of Europe, Heath, 1942.

Coulton, G. G., The Medieval Village, Macmillan, 1925.

Crawford, M. D. C., The Heritage of Cotton, Putnum, 1931.

Day, Clive, History of Commerce, Longmans, 1922.

, Economic Development in Modern Europe, Macmillan, 1933.

Ely, R. T,, Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, Macmillan, 1903.

Erman, Adolf, Life in Ancient Egypt, Macmillan, 1894.

Faulkner, H. U., American Economic History, Harper, 1924.

Frank, Tenney, Economic History of Rome, Johns Hopkins Press, 1927.

Fraser, H. F., Foreign Trade and World Politics, Knopf, 1921.

Giddins, P. H., The Birth of the Oil Industry, Macmillan, 1938.

Glotz, Gustave, Ancient Greece at Work, Knopf, 1926.

Gras, N. S. B., A History of Agriculture in Europe and America) Crofts, 1940.

Guillebaud, C. W., The Economic Recovery of Germany, 1933-1938, Macmillan,
1939.

Hammond, J. L. and B., The Village Labourer, Longmans, 1911.

, The Town Labourer, Longmans, 1925.

The Skilled Labourer, Longmans, 1920.

-, The Rise of Modern Industry, Methuen, 1925.

Hawks, Ellison, The Book of Electrical Wonders, Dial Press, 1936.

Hayward, W. S., and White, Percival, Chain Stores, McGraw-Hill, 1928.

Heaton, Herbert, Economic History of Europe, Harper, 1936.

Heckscher, E. F., Mercantilism, 2 Vols., Macmillan, 1935.

Herskovits, M. J., The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples, Knopf, 1940.

Hibben, Sons of Vulcan.

Hobson, J. A., Incentives in the New Industrial Order, Seltzer, 1925.

Horrocks, J. W., Short History of Mercantilism, Brentano, 1925.

Jastrow, Morris, The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria, Lippincott, 1915.

Kirkland, E. C., A History of American Economic Life, Crofts, 1932.

Laut, A. C., The Romance of the Rails, McBride, 1929.

Loeb, Life in a Technocracy.

, ed., National Survey of Potential Product Capacity, New York City

Housing Authority, 1935.
Mantoux, Paul, The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, Harcourt,

Brace, 1928.

Marshall, L. C., The Story of Human Progress, Macmillan, 1937.
McVey, F. L., Modem Industrialism, Appleton-Century, 1923.
Meakin, Walter, The New Industrial Revolution, Brentano, 1929.

886 SELECTED REFERENCES

Merz, Charles, And Then Came Ford, Doubleday, Doran, 1929.

Miller, J. A., Master Builders of Sixty Centuries, Appleton-Century, 1938.

Mitchell, H., The Economics of Ancient Greece, Cambridge University Press,

1940.

Morgan, 0. S., ed., Agricultural Systems of Middle Europe, Macmillan, 1933.
Miiller-Lyer, A History of Social Development.
Mumford, Technics and Civilization.
Nussbaum, F. L., A History of the Economic Institutions of Modern Europe,

Crofts, 1933.
Ogg, F. A., and Sharp, W. R., Economic Development of Modern Europe, Mac-

millan, 1926.

Person, H. S., ed., Scientific Management in American Industry, Harper, 1929.
Pirenne, Henri, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, Routledge,

1936.

Pitigliani, Fausto, The Italian Corporative State, Macmillan, 1934.
Preston, H. W., and Dodge, Louise, The Private Life of the Romans, Sanborn,

1930.

Pro the ro, R. W., English Farming, Past and Present, Longmans, 1922.
Renard, G. F., Life and Work in Prehistoric Times, Knopf, 1929.

, Guilds in the Middle Ages, Harcourt, Brace, 1919.

, Life and Work in Modern Europe, Knopf, 1926 (with Georges

Weulersse) .

Rogers, Agnes, From Machine to Man, Little, Brown, 1941.
Sayce, R. U., Primitive Arts and Crafts, Macmillan, 1933.
Taussig, F. W., The Tariff History of the United States, Putnam, 1923.
Thompson, J. W., Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, Appleton-
Century, 1928.

• '•' •-, Economic and Social History of Europe in the Later Middle Ages,

Appleton-Century, 1931.

Thurnwald, Richard, Economics in Primitive Communities, Oxford Press, 1932.
Toutain, J. F., Economic Life of the Ancient World, Knopf, 1930.
Tyler, J. M., The New Stone Age in Northern Europe, Scribner, 1921.
Unwin, George, Industrial Organization in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Oxford

Press, 1904.
Usher, A. P., An Introduction to the Industrial History of England, Houghton

Mifflin, 1920.
Veblen, Thorstein, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial

Arts, Macmillan, 1914.

Walton, Perry, The Story of Textiles, Tudor, 1936.
Ward, H. F., In Place of Profit, Scribner, 1933.
Weber, Max, General Economic History, Greenberg, 1927.
Webster, Travel by Air, Land and Sea.

Westerbrook, F. A., Industrial Management in this Machine Age, Crowell, 1932.
Westerfield, R. B., Middlemen in English Business, Yale University Press, 1915.
Willson, The Story of Rapid Transit.
Wolf, Howard and Ralph, Rubber: A Story of Glory and Oreed, Covici, Friede,

1936.

CHAPTER 5

Anderson, Nels, The Hobo, University of Chicago Press, 1923.

• • , Men on the Move, University of Chicago Press, 1940.

SELECTED REFERENCES 887

Arnold, T. W., The Folklore of Capitalism, Yale University Press, 1937.

, The Bottlenecks of Business, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940.

Baake, E. W., The Unemployed Man, Dutton, 1934.

Barnes, H. E., The Money Changers versus the New Deal, Long & Smith, 1934.

Beaglehole, Ernest, Property, Macmillan, 1932.

Berle, A. A., and Means, G. C., The Modern Corporation and Private Property,

Commerce Clearing House, 1932.
Blair, John, Seeds of Destruction, Covici-Friede, 1938.

Bonbright, J. C., and Means, G. C., The Holding Company, McGraw-Hill, 1932.
Bowers, E. L., Is It Safe to Work? Houghton Mifflin, 1930.
Brandeis, L. B., Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It, Stokes,

1932.

Brooks, R. R., When Labor Organizes, Yale University Press, 1937.
Chase, Stuart, The Tragedy of Waste, Macmillan, 1925.

, A New Deal, Macmillan, 1932.

— , The Economy of Abundance, Macmillan, 1934.

, Idle Money, Idle Men, Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

Clark, Evans, et al., The Internal Debts of the United States, Macmillan, 1933.

, More Security for Old Age, Twentieth Century Fund, 1937.

Corey, Lewis, The House of Morgan, Watt, 1930.

Coyle, D. C., Roads to a New America, Little, Brown, 1938.

Daugherty, C. R., Labor Problems in American Industry, Houghton, Mifflin, 1938.

Davis, Forrest, What Price Wall Street, Godwin, 1932.

Davis, Jerome, Capitalism and Its Culture, Farrar & Rinehart, 1935.

Dennis, Lawrence, 7s Capitalism Doomed? Harper, 1932.

, The Coming American Fascism, Harper, 1936.

Doane, R. R., The Measurement of American Wealth, Harper, 1933.

, The Anatomy of American Wealth, Harper, 1940.

Dobb, M. H., Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress, Lpndon, 1925.
Douglas, P. H., Social Security in the United States, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

, Controlling Depressions, Norton, 1935.

, and Director, Aaron, The Problem of Unemployment, Macmillan,

1931.

Douglas, W. 0., Democracy and Finance, Yale University Press, 1941.
Epstein, Abraham, Insecurity : A Challenge to America, Smith & Haas, 1933.
Flynn, J. T., Investment Trusts Gone Wrong, New Republic Press, 1930.

, Graft in Business, Vanguard, 1931.

, Security Speculation, Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

Foster, W. Z., Towards a Soviet America, Coward McCann, 1932.

Fuller, R. G., Child Labor and the Constitution, Crowell, 1923.

Gill, Corrington, Wasted Manpower, Norton, 1939.

Goldberg, R. M., Occupational Diseases, Columbia University Press, 1931.

Goldmark, Josephine, Fatigue and Efficiency, Russell Sage Foundation, 1917.

Gras, N. S. B., Business and Capitalism, Crofts, 1939.

Hacker, L. M., American Problems of Today, Crofts, 1938.

, The Triumph of American Capitalism, Simon & Schuster, 1940.

Hacket, J. D., Health Maintenance in Industry, Shaw, 1925.

Hamilton, Alice, Industrial Poisons in the United States, Macmillan, 1925.

Hansen, A. H., Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles, Norton, 1940.

Hart, A. G., et al., Debts and Recovery, Twentieth Century Fund, 1938.

Jones, Bassett, Debt and Production, Day, 1933.

Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Baronsf Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Kemnitzer, W. J., The Rebirth of Monopoly, Harper, 1938.

888 SELECTED REFERENCES

Kennedy, E. D., Dividends to Pay, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940.

Kcynes, J. M., et al., Unemployment as a World Problem, University of Chicago
Press, 1931.

Kuznets, Simon, National Income and Its Composition, 191 9-1 938 f 2 Vols., Na-
tional Bureau of Economic Research, 1942.

Laidler, H. W., Concentration in American Industry, Crowell, 193L

Leven, Maurice, The Income Structure of the United States, Brookings Institu-
tion, 1938.

Lowenthal, Max, The Investor Pays, Knopf, 1933.

Lundberg, Ferdinand, America's Sixty Families, Vanguard, 1937.

MacDonald, Lois, Labor Problems and the American Scene, Harper, 1938.

MacDougall, E. D., ed., Crime for Profit, Stratford, 1933.
-, Speculation and Gambling, Stratford, 1936.

Mallon, G. W., Bankers versus Consumers, Day, 1933.

Mangold, G. B., Problems of Child Welfare, Macmillan, 1936.

Melvin, Bruce, Youth — Millions Too Many, Association Press, 1940.

Moiilton, H. G., The Formation of Capital, Brookings Institution, 1935.

Myers, Gustavus, History of Great American Fortunes, 3 Vols., Kerr, 1909.

Myers, M. G., Monetary Proposals for Social Reform, Columbia University
Press, 1940.

Newcomer, Mabel, Taxation and Fiscal Policy, Columbia University Press, 1940.

Noyes, A. D., The Market Place, Little, Brown, 1938.

O'Leary, P. M., Corporate Enterprise and Modern Economic Life, Harper, 1933.

Perlman, Selig, Theory of the Labor Movement, Macmillan, 1928.

Rautenstrauch, Walter, Who Gets the Money? Harper, 1934 (new ed. 1939).

Ripley, W. Z., Main Street and Wall Street, Little, Brown, 1927.

Rochester, Anna, Rulers of America, International Publishers, 1936.

Rogers, J. H., Capitalism in Crisis, Yale University Press, 1938.

Rorty, James, Our Master's Voice: Advertising, Day, 1934.

Rosenfarb, Joseph, The National Labor Policy, Harper, 1940.

Rubinow, I. M., The Quest for Security, Holt, 1934.

Scherman, Harry, The Promises that Men Live By, Random House, 1938.

Simons, A. J., Holding Companies, Pitman, 1927.

Simpson, Kemper, The Margin Trader, Harper, 1938.

, Big Business, Efficiency and Fascism, Harper, 1941.

Snyder, Carl, Capitalism the Creator, Macmillan, 1940.

Stewart, P. W., and Dewhurst, J. F., Does Distribution Cost Too Much? Twen-
tieth Century Fund.

Tannenbaum, Frank, The Labor Movement, Putnam, 1921.

Tawney, R. H., The Acquisitive Society, Harcourt, Brace, 1920.

Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of Business Enterprise, Scribner, 1904.

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, The Decay of Capitalist Civilization, Harcourt,
Brace, 1921.

Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Scribner, 1930.

Wickwire, A. M., The Weeds of Wail Street, Newcastle Press, 1932.

Winthrop, Alden, Are You a Stockholder? Covici, Friede, 1937.

Wormser, I. M., Frankenstein Incorporated, McGraw-Hill, 1931.

CHAPTER 6

Arnold, The Bottlenecks of Business.
, The Folklore of^ Capitalism.

SELECTED REFERENCES 889

Babson, R. W., // Inflation Comes, Stokes, 1937.

Barnes, The Money -Changers versus the New Deal.

Beaglehole, Property.

Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property.

Borsodi, Ralph, Prosperity anod Security, Harper, 1938.

Boudin, L. B., Government by Judiciary, 2 Vols., Godwin, 1932.

Brailsford, H. N., Property or Peace, Covici, Friede, 1934.

Bremer, C. D., American Bank Failures, Columbia University Press, 1935.

Briefs, G. A., The Proletariat, McGraw-Hill, 1937.

Brown, H. G., The Economic Basis of Tax Reform, Lucas, 1932.

Bye, R. T., and Blodgett, R. H., Getting and Spending, Crofts, 1937.

Calhoun, A. W., The Social Universe, Vanguard, 1932.

Clark, The Internal Debts of the United States.

, The National Debt and Government Credit, Twentieth Century

Fund, 1937.
Clay, Henry, Property and Inheritance, Daily News Co. (London), 1923.

, The Problem of Industrial Relations, Macmillan, 1929.

Coker, F. W., Democracy, Liberty and Property, Macmillan, 1942.

Coon, Horace, Money to Burn, Longmans, 1939.

Coyle, D. C., Why Pay Taxes f National Home Library, 1937.

Davis, Capitalism and Its Culture.

Delaporte, L. J., Mesopotamia, Knopf, 1925.

Doane, The Measurement of American Wealth.

Ely, R. T., Property and Contract, 2 Vols., Macmillan, 1914.

Emden, P. II., The Money Powers of Europe, Applcton-Century, 1938.

Epstein, Abraham, "Do the Rich Give to Charity?" American Mercury, May,

1931.
Flynn, J. T., Investment Trusts Gone Wrong, New Republic Press, 1930.

: , Security Speculation, Harcourt, Brace, 1924.

Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work.

Gore, Property: Its Duties and Rights.

Greenwood, Ernest, Spenders All, Appleton-Century, 1935.

Hamilton, W. H., "Property," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12.

Hardy, C. 0., Tax-Exempt Securities and the Surtax, Macmillan, 1926.

Haxey, Simon, England's Money Lords, Harrison-Hitton, 1939.

Hazelett, C. W., Incentive Taxation, Dutton, 1936.

Helton, Roy, Sold Out to the Future, Harper, 1935.

Herskovits, The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples.

Hobson, J. A., The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, Scribner, 1926.

, Incentives in the New Industrial Order.

Jackson, R. H., The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy, Knopf, 1941.
Jones, A. W., Life, Liberty and Property, Lippincott, 1940.
Keller, A. G., Social Science, Ginn, 1925.

: , Man's Rough Road.

Kelley, F. C., How to Lose Your Money Prudently, Swain, 1933.

Kennedy, Dividends to Pay.

Kimmel, L. II., The Taxation of Banks, National Industrial Conference Board,

1934.

Larkin, Paschal, Property in the Eighteenth Century, Dublin, 1930.
Lindeman, E. C., Wealth and Culture, Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
Louis, Paul, Ancient Rome at Work, Knopf, 1927.
Lowie, Primitive Society.

890 SELECTED REFERENCES

Lundberg, America's Sixty Families,

Moret, Alexandra, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, Knopf, 1927.

Moulton, The Formation of Capital.

Nussbaum, A History of the Economic Institutions of Modern Europe.

Palm, F. C., The Middle Classes: Then and Now, Macmillan, 1936.

Ramsay, M. L., Pyramids of Power, Bobbs-Merrill, 1937.

Rautenstrauch, Who Gets the Money f

Rignano, Eugene, The Social Significance of the Inheritance Tax, Knopf, 1924.

Schcrman, The Promises Men Live By.

Schultz, W. J., The Taxation of Inheritance, Houghton Mifflin, 1926.

Sinclair, Upton, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, Sinclair, 1933.

Snyder, Capitalism the Creator.

Studenski, Paul, ed., Taxation and Public Policy, R. R. Smith, 1936.

Taussig, F. W., Inventors and Money-Makers, Macmillan, 1915.

Tawney, R. H., The Acquisitive Society, Harcourt, Brace, 1920.

-, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Harcourt, Brace, 1926.

Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages.

, Economic and Social History of the Later Middle Ages.

Tilden, Freeman, A World in Debt, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.

Untereiner, R. E., The Tax Racket, Lippincott, 1933.

Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Macmillan, 1899.

, Absentee Ownership, Huebsch, 1923.

, The Theory of Business Enterprise.

Wallis, Louis, Safeguard Productive Capital, Doubleday, Doran, 1935.
Ward, C. O., The Ancient Lowly, 2 Vols., Kerr, 1907.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Wedgwood, Josiah, The Economics of Inheritance, Routledge, 1929.
Winthrop, Alden, Are You a Stockholder? Covici, Friede, 1937.

CHAPTER 7

Barnes, H. E., History and Social Intelligence, Knopf, 1926.
Beard, C. A., The Open Door at Home, Macmillan, 1934.

-, The Idea of National Interest, Macmillan, 1934.

-, The Economic Basis of Politics, Knopf, 1932.

Bennett, H. A., The Constitution in School and College, Putnam, 1935.

Borgeaud, Charles, The Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England,
Scribner, 1894.

, The Adoption and Amendment of Constitutions in Europe and

America, Macmillan, 1895.

Brant, Irving, Storm Over the Constitution, Bobbs-Merrill, 1936.

Elliott, W. Y., The Need for Constitutional Reform, McGraw-Hill, 1935.

Gellerman, William, The American Legion as Educator, Teachers College Pub-
lications, 1938.

Gibbons, H. A., Nationalism and Internationalism, Stokes, 1930.

Greenberg, L. S., Nationalism in a Changing World, Greenberg, 1937.

Hamilton, W. H., and Adair, Douglass, The Power to Govern, Norton, 1937.

Hayes, C. J. H., Essays on Nationalism, Macmillan, 1926.

, Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism, Long & Smith, 1931.

Holcombe, A. N., The Foundations of the Modern Commonwealth, Harper, 1923.

Jenks, Edward, The State and the Nation, Button, 1919.

SELECTED REFERENCES 891

Jensen, Merrill, The Articles of Confederation, University of Wisconsin Press,

1940.

Levy, B. H., Our Constitution, Tool or Testament? Knopf, 1940.
Lowie, R. H., The Origin of the State, Harcourt, Brace, 1937.
Lyon, Hastings, The Constitution and the Men Who Made It, Houghton

Mifflin, 1936.

MacDonald, William, A New Constitution for a New America, Huebsch, 1921.
MacLeod, W. C., The Origin and History of Politics, Wiley, 1931.
McBain, H. L., The Living Constitution, Macmillan, 1927.
Mcllwain, C. H., Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern, Cornell University

Press, 1940.

, Constitutionalism and the Changing World, Macmillan, 1939.

Merriam, C. E., The Making of Citizens, University of Chicago Press, 1931.

, The Written Constitution and the Unwritten, Smith, 1931.

Miller, H. A., Races, Nations and Classes, Lippincott, 1926.

, The Beginnings of Tomorrow, Stokes, 1933.

Morey, W. C., The First State Constitutions, Annals of the American Academy,

1893.

Muir, Ramsay, Nationalism and Internationalism, Houghton Mifflin, 1917.
Partridge, G. E., The Psychology of Nations, Macmillan, 1919.
Pillsbury, W. B., The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism, Applcton-

Century, 1919.

Riegel, 0. W., Mobilizing for Chaos, Yale University Press, 1934.
Robinson, J. H., The Human Comedy, Harper, 1937.
Rose, J. H., Nationality in Modern History, Macmillan, 1916.
Sait, Political Institutions.
Smith, J. Allen, The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government, Holt,

1930.

CHAPTER 8

Adams, S. H., The Incredible Era, Houghton Mifflin, 1940.

Barnes, Sociology and Political Theory.

Beman, L. T., The Direct Primary, Wilson, 1926.

Bentley, A. F., The Process of Government, University of Chicago Press, 1908.

Brooks, R. C., Corruption in American Politics and Life, Dodd, Mead, 1910.

, Political Parties and Electoral Problems, Harper, 1923.

Bruce, H. R., American Parties and Politics, Holt, 1927.

Buck, A. E., The Budget in Governments Today, Macmillan, 1934.

Buehler, A. G., ed., Billions for Defense, Annals of the American Academy, 1941.

Carpenter, W. S., and Stafford, P. T., State and Local Government in the United

States, Crofts, 1936.

Chamberlain, J. P., Legislative Processes, Appleton-Century, 1936.
Childs, H. L., Labor and Capital in National Politics, Ohio State University Press,

1930.

Dinneen, J. F., Ward Eight, Harper, 1936.

Dobyns, Fletcher, The Underworld in American Politics, Kingsport Press, 1932.
Douglas, P. H., The Coming of a New Party, McGraw-Hill, 1932.
Durham, Knowlton, Billions for Veterans, Harcourt, Brace, 1932.
Fine, Nathan, Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States, Rand School, 1928.
Fish, C. R., Civil Service and the Patronage, Longmans, 1905.

892 SELECTED REFERENCES

Friedrich, C. J., et al., Problems of American Public Service, McGraw-Hill, 1935.

Garrigues, C. H., You're Paying for It, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.

Greenwood, Ernest, Spenders All, Appleton-Century, 1935.

Harding, T. S., T.N.T. Those National Tax Eaters, Long & Smith, 1934.

Harris, J. P., Election Administration in the United States, Brookings Institution,

1934,

Haynes, F. E., Third Party Movements, Iowa State Historical Society, 1916.
Helm, W. P., Washington Swindle Sheet, Boni, 1932.
Herring, E. P., Group Representation Before Congress, Johns Hopkins Press,

1929.

" > The Politics of Democracy, Norton, 1940.
Holcombe, A. N., Political Parties of Today, Harper, 1924.

, The New Party Politics, Norton, 1933.

-, The Middle Classes in American Politics, Harvard University Press,

1940.

Key, V. O., Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups, Crowell, 1942.
Laswcll, H. D., Politics, McGraw-Hill, 1936.
Logan, E. B., ed,, The American Political Scene, Harper, 1938.
Luce, Robert, Legislative Problems, Houghton Mifflin, 1935.
Ludlow, Lewis, America Go Bust, Stratford, 1933.
Lundbcrg, America's Sixty Families.

Mayo, Katherine, Soldiers What Next? Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
McKean, D. D., The Boss: Machine Politics in Action, Houghton Mifflin, 1940.
Merriam, C. E., The American Party System, Macmillan, 1940.
tylichels, Robert, Political Parties, Hearst's International Library, 1915.
Myers, Gustavus, A History of Tammany Hall, Boni & Liveright, 1917.
Northrop, W. B. and J. B., The Insolence of Office, Putnam, 1932.
Odegard, P. H., and Helms, E. A., American Politics, Harper, 1938.
Overacker, Louise, The Presidential Primary, Macmillan, 1926.
Powell, Talcott, Tattered Banners, Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
Ray, P. O., An Introduction to Political Parties and Practical Politics, Scribner,

1917.

Sait, E. M., American Parties and Elections, Appleton-Century, 1939.
Salter, J. T., Boss Rule, McGraw-Hill, 1935.

, The Pattern of Politics, Macmillan, 1940.

3ikes, E. R., State and Federal Corrupt Practices Legislation, Duke University

Press, 1928.

Wallas, Graham, Human Nature in Politics, Houghton Mifflin, 1909.
WTallis, J. H., The Politician, Stokes, 1935.
Werner, M. R., Privileged Characters, McBride, 1935.

Willoughby, W. F., The National Budget System, Brookings Institution, 1927.
, Financial Conditions and Operations of the National Government,

1921-1930, Brookings Institution, 1931.

CHAPTER 9

Agar, Herbert, The People's Choice, Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
Albig, William, Public Opinion, McGraw-Hill, 1939.
Anastasia, Anne, Differential Psychology, Macmillan, 1937.
Anshen, R. A., ed., Freedom: Its Meaning, Harcourt, Brace, 1940.
Ascoli, Max, Intelligence in Politics, Norton, 1938.

SELECTED REFERENCES 893

Barnes, H. E., Living in the Twentieth Century, Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
Bates, E. S., This Land of Liberty, Harper, 1930.
Beard, William, Government and Technology, Macmillan, 1934.
Becker, C. L., Modern Democracy, Yale University Press, 1941.

, New Liberties for Old, Yale University Press, 1941.

Bennett, J. L., The Essential American Tradition, Doubleday, Doran, 1925.
Bonn, M. J., The Crisis of European Democracy, Yale University Press, 1925.
Brigham, C. C., A Study of American Intelligence, Princeton University Press,

1923.

Brooks, R. C., Deliver Us from Dictators, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935.
Bryce, James, Modern Democracies, 2 Vols., Macmillan, 1921.
Buck, The Budget in Governments of Today.
Burnham, The Managerial Revolution.
Burns, C. D., Challenge to Democracy, Norton, 1935.
Calkins, Clinch, Spy Overhead, Harcourt, Brace, 1937.
Chafee, Zechariah, Free Speech in the United States, Harvard University Press,

1941.

Coker, F. W., Recent Political Thought, Appleton-Century, 1934.
Counts, G. S., The Prospects of American Democracy, Day, 1938.

, The Schools Can Teach Democracy, Day, 1941.

Cousins, Norman, ed., A Treasury of Democracy, Coward-McCann, 1942.

Craven, Avery, Democracy in American Life, University of Chicago Press, 1941.

Dennis, The Coming American Fascism.

Dos Passes, John, The Ground We Stand On, Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

Durant, W. J., Mansions of Philosophy, Simon & Schuster, 1929.

Edman, Irwin, ed., Fountain Heads of Freedom, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941.

Eldridge, Seba, Public Intelligence, University of Kansas Press, 1935.

Ellis, R. S., The Psychology of Individual Differences, Appleton-Century, 1928.

Ernst, M. L., and Lindey, Alexander, The Censor Marches On, Doubleday,

Doran, 1940.

Everett, Samuel, Democracy Faces the Future, Columbia University Press, 1935.
Forman, S. E., A Good Word for Democracy, Appleton-Century, 1937.
Fosdick, Dorothy, What Is Liberty? Harper, 1939.
Friedrich, Problems of the American Public Service.
Garrison, W. E., Intolerance, Round Table Press, 1934.
Gilliland, A. R., and Clark, E. L., The Psychology of Individual Differences,

Prentice-Hall, 1939.

Glover, T. R., Democracy in the Ancient World, Macmillan, 1927.
Gracchus, G. S., The Renaissance of Democracy, Pegasus, 1937.
Hallgren, M. A., The Landscape of Freedom, Howell, Soskin, 1941.
Hamilton and Adair, The Power to Govern.
Hattersley, A. F., Short History of Democracy, Macmillan, 1930.
Hays, A. G., Let Freedom Ring, Boni & Liveright, 1928.

, Trial by Prejudice, Covici, Friede, 1933.

, Democracy Works, Random House, 1940.

Herring, The Politics of Democracy.

Hoag, C. G., and Hallett, G. H., Proportional Representation, Macmillan, 1926.

Holcombe, A. N., Government in a Planned Democracy, Norton, 1935.

Huberman, Leo, The Labor Spy Racket, Modern Age, 1937.

Hudson, J. W., Why Democracy? Appleton-Century, 1936.

Huxley, J. S., Democracy Marches, Harper, 1941.

James, H. G., Principles of Prussian Administration, Macmillan, 1913.

894 SELECTED REFERENCES

Joad, C. E. M., Liberty Today, Dutton, 1935.

Kallen, H. M., ed., Freedom in the Modern World, Coward-McCann, 1928.

Kingsley, J. D., and Petegorsky, D. W., Strategy for Democracy, Longmans,

Green, 1942.
Laski, H. J., Liberty in the Modern State, Harper, 1930.

; Democracy in Crisis, University of North Carolina Press, 1933.

, The Rise of Liberalism, Harper, 1936.

Lasswell, H. D., Democracy through Public Opinion, Banta, 1941.

Loeb, Life in a Technocracy.

Martin, E. D., Liberty, Norton, 1930.

Marx, F. M., Public Management in the New Democracy, Harper, 1940.

Mencken, H. L., Notes on Democracy, Knopf, 1926.

Merriam, C. E,, The Role of Politics in Social Change, New York University

Press, 1936.

, The New Democracy and the New Despotism, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

, What Is Democracy? University of Chicago Press, 1941.

, On the Agenda of Democracy, Harvard University Press, 1941.

Minis, Edwin, The Majority of the People, Modern Age, 1941.

Mosher, W. E., and Kingsley, J. D., Public Personnel Administration, Harper,

1941.

Norton, T. J., Losing Liberty Judicially, Macmillan, 1928.
Odegard, P. H., et al., Democracy in Transition, Appleton-Century, 1937.
Overstreet, H. A., Our Free Minds, Norton, 1941.
Palm, F. C., The Middle Classes Then and Now, Macmillan, 1936.
Penman, J. S., The Irresistible Movement of Democracy, Macmillan, 1923.
Pink, M. A., A Realist Looks at Democracy, Stokes, 1931.
Sait, E. M., Democracy, Appleton-Century, 1929.
Salter, The Pattern of Politics.
Sejdes, George, You Can't Print That, Payson & Clarke, 1929.

, You Can't Do That, Modern Age, 1938.

Shalloo, J,. P., Private Police, Annals of the American Academy, 1933.

Smith, Bernard, The American Spirit, Knopf, 1941.

Soule, George, The Coming American Revolution, Macmillan, 1934.

, The Future of Liberty, Macmillan, 1936.

Stout, II. M., Public Service in Great Britain, University of North Carolina Press,

1938.

Strunsky, Simeon, The Living Tradition, Doubleday, Doran, 1939.
Swancara, Frank, The Obstruction of Justice by Religion, Courtright, 1936.
Swing, R. G., Forerunners of American Fascism, Messner, 1935.
Tead, Ordway, The Case for Democracy, Association Press, 1938.
Wallace, W. K, The Passing of Politics, Macmillan, 1924.
Wallis, The Politician.
Whipple, Leon, Our Ancient Liberties, Wilson, 1927.

, The Story of Civil Liberty in the United States, Vanguard, 1927.

White, L. D., and Smith, T. V., Politics and Public Service, Harper, 1939.

CHAPTER 10

Ackermann, Wolfgang, Are We Civilized? Covici, Friede, 1936.

Adams, R. E., War and Wages, Primrose, 1935.

Background of War, By the Editors of Fortune, Knopf, 1937.

SELECTED REFERENCES 895

Bakeless, John, The Origin of the Next War, Viking, 1926.
Baldwin, H. W., The Caissons Roll, Knopf, 1938.

, United We Stand, McGraw-Hill, 1941.

Barnes, H. E., The Genesis of the World War, Knopf, 1926.

, World Politics, Knopf, 1930.

Beard, C. A., The Navy: Defense or Portent? Harper, 1932.

Bernstein, Herman, Can We Abolish War? Broadview, 1935.

Brinton, H., ed., Does Capitalism Cause Warf Brinton, 1935.

Brodie, Bernard, Sea Power in the Machine Age, Princeton University Press,

1941.

Buehler, Billions for Defense.

Butler, Harold, The Lost Peace, Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

Clarkson, J. D., and Cochran, T. C., War as a Social Institution, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1941.

Curti, M. E., Peace or War, Norton, 1936.
Davie, The Evolution of War.

Dell, Robert, The Geneva Racket, 1920-1939, Hale (London), 1941.
Dennis, Lawrence, The Dynamics of War and Revolution, Weekly Foreign Letter,

1940.

DeWilde, J. C., et al., Handbook of the War, Houghton Mifflin, 1939.
Dodson, Leonidas, ed., The Shadow of War, Annals of the American Academy,

1934.

Dupuy, R. E., and Eliot, G. F., // War Comes, Macmillan, 1937.
Einzig, Paul, Economic Warfare, Macmillan, 1941.
Eliot, G. F., The Ramparts We Watch, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940.

, Bombs Bursting in Air, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940.

, The Defense of the Americas, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941.

Engelbrecht, H. C., One Hell of a Business, McBride, 1934.

, Revolt against War, Dodd, Mead, 1937.

Engelbrecht, H. C., and Hanighen, F. C., Merchants of Death, Dodd, Mead,

1934.

Hamlin, C. H., The War Myth in American History, Vanguard, 1927.
Hart, Liddell, Europe in Arms, Random House, 1937.
Herring, Pendleton, The Impact of War, Farrar & Rinehart, 1941.
Jameson, Storm, ed., Challenge to Death, Dutton, 1935.
Jennings, W. I., A Federation for Western Europe, Macmillan, 1940.
Kleinschmid, R. B. von, and Martin, C. E., War and Society, University of

Southern California Press, 1941.
Knight, B. W., How to Run a War, Knopf, 1936.
LaMotte, E. N., The Backwash of War, Putnam, 1934.
Lehmann-Russbuldt, Otto, War for Profits, King, 1930.
Lewinsohn, Richard, The Profits of War, Dutton, 1937.
Lorwin, L. L., The Economic Consequences of the Second World War, Random

House, 1942.

Major, R. H., Fatal Partners: War and Disease, Doubleday, Doran, 1941.
Montross, War through the Ages.
Munk, Frank, The Economics of Force, Stewart, 1940.
Nearing, Scott, War, Vanguard Press, 1930.
Neumann, Robert, Zaharoff : the Armaments King, Knopf, 1936.
Nichols, Beverly, Cry Havoc, Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
Nickerson, Hoffman, Can We Limit Warf Stokes, 1934.
, The Armed Horde, Putnam, 1940.

896 SELECTED REFERENCES

Nicolai, G. F., The Biology of War, Appletoii-Century, 1918.

Noel-Baker, Philip, The Private Manufacture of Armaments, Oxford Press, 1937.

Palmer, Frederick, Our Gallant Madness, Doubleday, Doran, 1937.

Porritt, Arthur, ed., The Causes of War, Macmillan, 1932.

Pratt, Fletcher, America and Total War, Smith & Durrell, 1941.

Raushenbush, Stephen and Joan, War Madness, National Home Library, 1937.

Seldes, George, Iron, Blood and Profits, Harper, 1934.

Shapiro, Harry, What Every Young Man Should Know about War, Knight, 1937.

Sorokin, P. A., Social and Cultural Dynamics, 3 Vols., American Book Co., 1937,

Vol. Ill, Part II.

Sprier, Hans, and Kahler, Alfred, War in Our Time, Norton, 1939.
Spiegel, H. W,, The Economics of Total War, Applcton-Century, 1942.
Spykman, N. K, America's Strategy in World Politics, Harcourt, Brace, 1942.
Stein, Emanuel and Bachman, Jules, War Economics, Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.
Stein, R. M,, M-Day: the First Day of War, Harcourt, Brace, 1936.
Steiner, H. A., Principles and Problems of International Relations, Harper, 1940.
Stockton, Richard, Inevitable War, Perth, 1932.
Taylor, Edmund, The Strategy of Terror, Houghton Mifflin, 1940.
Tuttle, F. G., ed., Alternatives to War, Harper, 1931.
Vagts, Alfred, The History of Militarism, Norton, 1937.

Van Kleffens, E. N., Juggernaut Over Holland, Columbia University Press, 1941.
Waldman, Seymour, Death and Profits, Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932.
Waller, Willard, ed., War in the Twentieth Century, Dryden, 1939.
Werner, Max, Battle for the World, Modern Age, 1941.
Wright, Quincy, The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace, Longmans,

1935.

CHAPTERS 11-12

Arnold, T. W., The Symbols of Government, Yale University Press, 1935.

, The Folklore of Capitalism.

Barnes, H. E., The Repression of Crime, Doran, 1926.

Bates, E. S., The Story of the Supreme Court, Bobbs-Merrill, 1937.

Berle, A. A., Articles "Legal Profession," and "Legal Education" in Encyclo-
paedia of the Social Sciences.

Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property.

Berolzheimer, Fritz, The World's Legal Philosophies, Macmillan, 1912.

Best, Harry, Crime and the Criminal Law in the United States, Macmillan, 1930.

Black, F. R., Ill-Starred Prohibition Cases, Badger, 1931.

Bok, Curtis, Backbone of the Herring, Knopf, 1941.

Boorstin, D. J., The Mysterious Science of the Law, Harvard University Press,
1941.

Borchard, E. M., Convicting the Innocent, Yale University Press, 1932.

Boudin, Government by Judiciary.

Bradway, J. S., ed., Frontiers of Legal Aid Work, Annals of the American Acad-
emy, 1939.

Cairns, Huntington, Law and the Social Sciences, Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Christian, E. B. V., Solicitors: An Outline of their History, London, 1925.

Cohen, J. H., The Law: Business or Profession? Jennings, 1924.

Corwin, E. S., The Twilight of the Supreme Court, Yale University Press, 1934.

, Court Over Constitution, Princeton University Press, 1938.

SELECTED REFERENCES 897

Cushman, R. E., Leading Constitutional Decisions, Crofts, 1940.

Darrow, Clarence, The Story of My Life, Scribners, 1932.

Feinstein, Isidor, The Court Disposes, Covici, Friede, 1937.

Frank, Jerome, Law and the Modern Mind, Brentano, 1930.

Gisnet, Morris, A Lawyer Tells the Truth, Concord Press, 1931.

Glueck, S. S., Crime and Justice, Little, Brown, 1936.

Goldberg, L. P., and Levenson, Eleanore, Lawless Judges, Rand School Press,

1935.

Green, Leon, Judge and Jury, Vernon Law Book Co., 1930.
Gurvitch, Georges, The Sociology of Law, Philosophical Library, 1942.
Haines, C. G., The Revival of Natural Law Concepts, Harvard University Press,

1930.

Harrison, C. Y., Clarence Darrow, Cape & Smith, 1931.
Hays, Trial by Prejudice.

Herbert, A. P., Uncommon Law, Doubleday, Doran, 1936.
Hopkins, E. J., Our Lawless Police, Viking Press, 1931.
Jackson, Percival, Look at the Law, Button, 1940.
Jackson, R. H., The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy, Knopf, 1941.
Kelley, How to Lose Your Money Prudently.
Lavine, Emafcuel, The Third Degree, Vanguard, 1930.
Levy, Our Constitution: Tool or Testament?

Maguire, J. M., The Lance of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1928.
Moley, Raymond, et al., The Missouri Crime Survey, Macmillan, 1926.

, Our Criminal Courts, Minton, 1930.

Mortenson, Ernest, You Be the Judge, Longmans, 1940.

Myers, Gustavus, History of the Supreme Court, Kerr, 1925.

Parker, J. R., Attorneys at Law, Doubleday, Doran, 1941.

Parsons, Frank, Legal Doctrine and Social Progress, Huebsch, 1911.

Partridge, Bellamy, Country Lawyer, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

Pearson, Drew, and Allen, R. S., The Nine Old Men, Doubleday, Doran, 1936.

Pound, Roscoe, Interpretations of Legal History, Macmillan, 1923.

, et al., Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Cleveland Foundation, 1922.

Raby, R. C., 50 Famous Trials, Washington Law Book Co., 1932.

Radin, Max, The Law and Mr. Smith, Bobbs-Merrill, 1940.

Ripley, Main Street and Wall Street.

Robinson, E. S., Law and the Lawyers, Macmillan, 1935.

Robson, W. A., Civilization and the Growth of Law, Macmillan, 1935.

Rodell, Fred, Woe unto You, Lawyers, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940.

Schlosser, A. H., Lawyers Must Eat, Vanguard, 1933.

Seagle, William, There Ought to Be a Law, Macaulay, 1933.

, The Quest for Law, Knopf, 1941.

Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.

Smith, Munroe, The Development of European Law, Columbia University Press,

1928.

Smith, R. H., Justice and the Poor, Carnegie Foundation, Bulletin 13, 19,19.
, Growth of Legal Aid Work in the United States, Government

Printing Office, 1926.

Stalmaster, Irving, What Price Jury Trials? Stratford, 1931.
Stone, Irving, Clarence Darrow for the Defense, Doubleday, Doran, 1941.
Swancara, The Obstruction of Justice by Religion.
Taft, H. W., Witnesses in Court, Macmillan, 1934.
Waite, J. P., Criminal Law in Action, Sears, 1934.

898 SELECTED REFERENCES

Warren, Charles, A History of the American Bar, Little Brown, 1911.

Wellman, F. L., Gentlemen of the Jury, Macmillan, 1925.

, ed., Success in Court, Macmillan, 1942.

Wickersham, G. W., et al, National Commission on Law Observance and En-
forcement, Reports, Government Printing Office, 1931.

Wigmore, J. H., Panorama of the World's Legal Systems, Washington Law Book
Company, 1936,

, A Pocket Code of the Rules of Evidence, Little Brown, 1910.

Williams, E. H., The Doctor in Court, Williams & Wilkins, 1929.

, The Insanity Plea, Williams & Wilkins, 1931.

Wood, A. E., and Waite, J. B., Crime and Its Treatment, American Book Co.,
1941.

Wormser, Frankstein Incorporated.

Wright, B. F., The Contract Clawe of the Constitution, Harvard University
Press, 1938.

, The Growth of American Constitutional Law, Rcynal & Hitch-
cock, 1942.

-, American Interpretations of Natural Law, Harvard University Press,

1931.
Zane, The Story of Law.

CHAPTER 13

Archer, G. L., History of Radio -to 1926, American Historical Society, 1938.

, Big Business and Radio, American Historical Co., 1939.

Bakeless, John, Magazine Making, Viking Press, 1931.

Barrett, J. W., Joseph Pulitzer and His World, Vanguard, 1941.

Bickel, K. A., New Empires, Lippincott, 1930.

Bird, G. L. and Merwin, F. E., The Newspaper and Society, Prentice-Hall, 1942.

Black, Archibald, The Story of Flying, McGraw-Hill, 1940.

Blumer, Herbert, Movies and Conduct, University of Chicago Press, 1933.

*, and Hauser, P. M., Movies, Delinquency and Crime, University of

Chicago Press, 1933.

Brindze, Ruth, Not to Be Broadcast, Vanguard, 1937.
Bruno, Harry, Wings Over America, McBride, 1942.

Carlson, Oliver, and Bates, E. 8., Hearst: Lord of San Simeon, Vanguard, 1936.
Chase, Stuart, The Tyranny of Words, Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
Clark, Delbert, Washington Dateline, Stokes, 1941.

Clarke, Tom, My Northcliffe Diary, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1931.
Cochran, N. D,, E. W. Scripps, Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
Coon, Horace, American Tel and Tel, Longmans, 1939.
Crawford, N. A., The Ethics of Journalism, Knopf, 1924.
Davis, H. O., The Empire of the Air, Ventura Free Press, 1932.
Desmond, P. W., The Press and World Affairs, Appleton-Century, 1937.
Dilts, M. M., The Telephone in a Changing World, Longmans, 1940.
Drewry, J. E., Contemporary American Magazines, University of Georgia Press,

1938.
Dunlap, 0. E., Radio in Advertising, Harper, 1931.

1 -, The Story of Radio, Dial Press, 1935.

Fechet, J. E., Flying, Williams <fe Wilkins, 1933.

Filler, Louis, Crusaders for American Liberalism, Harcourt, Brace, 19^9.
Forman, H. J., Our Movie Made Children, Macmillan, 1933.
Franklin. H. B.. Motion Picture Theatre Management, Doran, 1927.

SELECTED REFERENCES 899

Gardner, Gilson, Lusty Scripps, Vanguard, 1932.

Gauvreau, Emile, My Last Million Readers, Button, 1941.

Goldstrom, John, Narrative History of Aviation, Macmillan, 1930.

Gramling, Oliver, A. P.: the Story of News, Farrar & Rinehart, 1940.

Hampton, B. B., History of the Movies, Covici, Friede, 1931.

Harley, J. E., World-Wide Influence of the Cinema, University of Southern Cali-
fornia Press, 1942.

Hawks, Ellison, Book of Electrical Wonders, Dial Press, 1936.

Hayakawa, S. L, Language in Action, Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

Hettinger, H. S., ed., New Horizons in Radio, The Annals, 1941.

Howe, Quincy, The News and How to Understand It, Simon & Schuster, 1940.

Hughes, Hatcher, What Shocked the Censors, American Civil Liberties Union,
1933.

Hylander, C. T. and Harding, Robert, Introduction to Television, Macmillan,
1941.

Ickes, H. L., America's House of Lords, Harcourt, Brace, 1939.

, ed., Freedom of the Press Today, Vanguard, 1941.

Ireland, Alleyne, Adventures with a Genius, Dutton, 1937.

Irwin, Will, Propaganda and the News, McGraw-Hill, 1936.

Johnston, S. P., Horizons Unlimited, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1941.

Keezer, D. M., article "Press," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

Kocnigsberg, M., King News, Stokes, 1942.

Korzybski, Alfred, Science and Sanity (new ed.), Science Press, 1941.

Laine, Elizabeth, Motion Pictures and Radio, McGraw-Hill, 1938.

Lazarsfeld, P. F., Radio and the Printed Page, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1941.

Lewis, H. T., articles "Motion Pictures" and "Radio," Encyclopaedia of the Social
Sciences.

Lee, A. M., The Daily Newspaper in America, Macmillan, 1937.

Lee, J. M., History of American Journalism, Houghton MifHin, 1933.

Lee, I. J., Language Habits in Human Affairs, Harper, 1941.

Lundberg, Ferdinand, Imperial Hearst, Equinox, 1936.

Lyons, Eugene, ed., We Cover the World, Harcourt, Brace, 1937.

MacDougall, C. D., Newsroom Problems and Policies, Macmillan, 1941.

Mavity, N. B., The Modern Newspaper, Holt, 1930.

May, M. A., and Shuttleworth, Frank, Relation of .Motion Pictures to the Char-
acter and Attitudes of Children, Macmillan, 1933.

, Social Conduct and Attitudes of Movie Fans, Macmillan, 1933.

McEvoy, J. P., Are You Listening? Houghton Mifflin, 1932.

McKelwey, St. Clair, Gossip: the Life and Times of Walter Winchell, Viking,
1940.

Merz, Charles, And then Came Ford, Doubleday, Doran, 1929.

Morell, Peter, Poisons, Potions and Profits: the Antidote to Radio Advertising,
Knight, 1937.

Mott, F. L., History of American Magazines, 3 Vols., Harvard University Press,
1939.

, American Journalism, Macmillan, 1941.

, ed., Headlining America, Houghton Mifflin, 1937.

, and R. D. Casey, eds., Interpretations of Journalism, Grofts, 1937.

Ogden, C. K., and Richards, I. A., The Meaning of Meaning, Routledge, 1936.

Page, A. W., et aL, Modern Communication, Houghton Mifflin, 1932. : '

Payne, G. H., History of Journalism in the United States, Appleton-Century,
1930. ' ,

900 SELECTED REFERENCES

Pound, Arthur, The Turning Wheel, Doubleday, Doran, 1934.

Regier, C. C.; The Era of the Muckrakers, University of North Carolina Press,

1932.

Rolo, C. J., Radio Goes to War, Putnam, 1942.
Rose, C. B., National Policy for Radio Broadcasting, Harper, 1940.
Rosewater, Victor, History of Cooperative Newsgathering in the United States,

Appleton-Century, 1930.

Rosten, L. C., The Washington Correspondents, Harcourt, Brace, 1937.
, Hollywood — the Movie Colony, the Movie Makers, Harcourt,

Brace, 194L

Rotha, Paul, The Film Till Now, Peter Smith, 1931.
Schechter, A. A., and Anthony, Edward, / Live on Air, Stokes, 1941.
Seitz, D. C., Joseph Pulitzer, Simon & Schuster, 1934.
Seldes, George, Freedom of the Press, Bobbs-Merrill, 1935.

, Lords of the Press, Messner, 1939.

Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.

Smith, H. L., Airways, Knopf, 1942.

Squicr, G. W., Telling the World, Williams & Wilkins, 1933.

Summers, H. B., Radio Censorship, Wilson, 1939.

Tassin, A. V., The Magazine in America, Dodd, Mead, 1916.

Terman, F. E., Radio Engineering, McGraw-Hill, 1932.

Thompson, J. S., The Mechanism of the Linotype, Inland Printer Co., 1928.

Villard, O. G., Fighting Years, Harcourt, Brace, 1939.

Waples, Douglas, ed., Print, Radio and Film in a Democracy, University of

Chicago Press, 1942.

Walpole, Hugh, Semantics, Norton, 1941.

Webster, H. H., Travel by Air, Land and Sea, Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Willey, M. M. and Casey, R. D., eds., The Press in the Contemporary Scene,

Annals of the American Academy, 1942.
Willey, M, M. and Rice, S. A., "Communication," American Journal of Sociology,

May, 1931.

, Communication Agencies and Social Life, McGraw-Hill, 1933.

Willson, Beckles, Story of Rapid Transit^ Appleton, 1903.
Wood, J. W., Airports, Coward-McCann, 1940.

CHAPTER 14

Albig, Public Opinion.

Barnes, H. E., In Quest of Truth and Justice, National Historical Society, 1028.

Bartlett, F. C., Political Propaganda, Cambridge University Press, 1940.

Barzun, Jacques, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, Harcourt, Brace, 1937.

Bates, This Land of Liberty.

Bennett, The Essential American Tradition.

Bent, Silas, Ballyhoo, the Voice of the Press, Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Bernays, E. L., Crystallizing Public Opinion, Liveright, 1934.

, Propaganda, Liveright, 1928.

Billington, R. A. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860, Macmillan, 1938.

Black, Ill-Starred Prohibition Cases.

Brindze, Not to Be Broadcast.

Brock, H. L, Meddlers: Uplifting Moral Uplifters, Washburn, 1930.

Broun, Heywood, and Leech, Margaret, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the

Lord, Boni, 1927.
Cantrill, Hadley, The Invasion from Mars, Princeton University Press, 1940.

SELECTED REFERENCES 901

Childs, Labor and Capital in National Politics.

, ed., Propaganda and Dictatorship, Princeton University Press,

1936.

-, A Reference Guide to the Study of Public Opinion, Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1934.

Clarke, E. L., The Art of Straight Thinking, Appleton-Century, 1929.

Clinchy, E. R., AU in the Name of God, Day, 1934.

Creel, George, How We Advertised America, Harper, 1920.

Davidson, Philip, Propaganda in the American Revolution, 1763—1783, Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1941.

Dennett, M. W., Who's Obscene? Vanguard, 1930.

Desmond, R. W., The Press and World Affairs, Appleton-Century, 1937.

Doob, L. W., Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique, Holt, 1935.

Duffus, R. L., "Where Do We Get Our Prejudices?" Harper's Magazine, Sept.,
1936.

Engclbrecht and Hanighen, Merchants of Death.

Ernst, M. L., and Lindey, Alexander, Hold Your Tongue: Adventures in Libel
and Slander, Morrow, 1932.

, The Censor Marches On.

Ernst, M. L., and Lorentz, Pare, Censored: the Private Life of the Movie, Cape
and Smith, 1930.

Ernst, M. L., and Seagle, William, To the Pure; a Study in Obscenity and the
Censor, Viking, 1928.

Freeman, Ellis, Conquering the Man in the Street, Vanguard, 1940.

Garrison, Intolerance.

Graves, W. B., Readings in Public Opinion, Appleton, 1928.

Gruening, Ernest, The Public Pays, Vanguard, 1931.

Hankins, F. H., The Racial Basis of Civilization, Knopf, 1926.

Hargreave, John, Words Win Wars, Wells Gardner, Darton, 1940.

Hays, Let Freedom Ring.

Herring, Group Representation Before Congress.

Holmes, R. W., The Rhyme of Reason, Appleton-Century, 1939.

Howe, The News and How to Understand It.

Huxley, J. S., and Haddon, A. C., We Europeans, Harper, 1936.

Irwin, Propaganda and the News.

Jastrow, Joseph, The Betrayal of Intelligence: A Preface to Debunking, Green-
berg, 1938.

Johnston, H. A., What Rights Are Left, Macmillan, 1930.

Keith, Arthur, The Place of Prejudice in Modern Civilization, Day, 1931.

Key, Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups.

Larson, Cedric, Official Information for America at War, Rudge, 1942.

Lass well, H. D., Propaganda Technique in the World War, Peter Smith, 1938.

, Democracy through Public Opinion, Banta, 1941.

, and Blumenstock, D., World Revolutionary Propaganda, Knopf,

1939.

Lavine, Harold and Wechsler, James, War Propaganda and the United States,
Yale University Press, 1940.

Lee, Ivy, Publicity, Industries Publishing Co., 1925.

Lee, A. M., The Fine Art of Propaganda, Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

Levin, Jack, Power Ethics, Knopf, 1931.

Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion, Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

, American Inquisitors, Macmillan, 1928.

Long, J. C., Public Relations, McGraw-Hill, 1925.

902 SELECTED REFERENCES

Lumley, Means of Social Control.

, The Propaganda Menace, Appleton-Century, 1925.

Lundberg, George, Social Research, Longmans, 1929.

McCormick, R. R., The Freedom of the Press, Appleton-Century, 1936.

Mercer, F. A., and Fraser, G, L., eds., Modern Publicity in War, Studio Publi-
cations, 194L

Mcrriam, C. E., The Making of Citizens, University of Chicago Press, 1931.

Michael, George, Handout, Putnam, 1935.

Mock, J. R., Censorship, 1917, Princeton University Press, 1941.

, and Larson, Cedric, Words That Won the War, Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1939.

Munson, Gorham, Twelve Decisive Battles of the Mind, Greystone Press, 1942.

Nevins, Allan, ed., American Press Opinion, Heath, 1928.

Noel-Baker, Philip, The Private Manufacture of Armaments, Oxford, 1937.

Norton, Loosing Liberty Judicially.

Odegard, P. H., Pressure Politics, Knopf, 1928.

, The American Public Mind, Columbia University Press, 1930.

O'Higgins, Harvey, The American Mind in Action, Harper, 1924.

Parshley, H. M., Science and Good Behavior, Bobbs-Mcrrill, 1928.

Pierce, B. L., Public Opinion and the Teaching of History, Knopf, 1926.

Peterson, H. C., Propaganda for War, University of Oklahoma Press, 1939.

Playrie, C. E., Society at War, Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Ponsonby, Arthur, Falsehood in Wartime, Dutton, 1929.

Post, Louis, The Deportations Delirium, Kerr, 1923.

Read, J. M., Atrocity Propaganda, 1914-1919, Yale University Press, 1941.

Riegel, Mobilizing for Chaos.

Rorty, Our Master's Voice.

Rosten, The Washington Correspondents.

Russell, Bertrand, Free Thought and Official Propaganda, Viking, 1922.

Sargent, Porter, Getting US into War, Sargent, 1941.

Scott, J. F. Patriots in the Making, Appleton-Century, 1916.

The Menace of Nationalism in Education, Macmillan, 1926.

Seldes, George, You Can't Print That, Payson and Clarke, 1929.
Iron, Blood and Profits.
Freedom of the Press.
You Can't Do That.
Lords of the Press.
Witch Hunt, Modern Age, 1941.

Samuel, Maurice, Jews on Approval, Liveright, 1932.

Sanger, Margaret, My Fight for Birth Control, Farrar & Rinehart, 1931.

Shipley, Maynard, The War on Modern Science, Knopf, 1927.

Smith, C. W., Public Opinion in a Democracy, Prentice-Hall, 1942.

Soule, The Future of Liberty.

Starr, Mark, Lies and Hate in Education, Hogarth, 1929.

Sumner, Folkways.

Tenenbaum, Joseph, Races, Nations and Jews, Bloch, 1934.

Thompson, C. D., Confessions of the Power Trust, Dutton, 1932.

Throop, P. A., Criticism of the Crusade: A Study of Public Opinion and Crusade

Propaganda, Swets & JZeitlinger, 1940.
Valentin, Hugo, Anti-Semitism, Historically and Critically Examined, Viking,

1936.
Van Loon, Hendrik, Tolerance, Boni & Liveright, 1925.

SELECTED REFERENCES 903

Viereck, G. S., Spreading Germs of Hate, Liveright, 1930.

Walker, S. H., and Sklar, Paul, "Business Finds Its Voice," Harper's Magazine,

January-March, 1938.
Whipple, Our Ancient Liberties.

, The Story of Civil Liberty in the United States.

White, Walter, Rope and Faggot, Knopf, 1928.

Willis, I. C., England's Holy War, Knopf, 1928.

Wolf, Lucien, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs, Macmillan, 1921.

Wolfe, A. B., Conservatism, Radicalism and Scientific Method, Macmillan, 1923.

Wood, Mary, The Stranger, Columbia University Press, 1934.

Woodward, Helen, It's An Art, Harcourt, Brace, 1938.

Young, E. J., Looking Behind the Censorships, Lippincott, 1938.

Young, Kimball, Bibliography for Propaganda and Censorship, University of

Oregon Press, 1928.

CHAPTER 15

Abbott, Edith, Women in Industry, Appleton, 1910.

Apstein, T. E., The Parting of the Ways, Dodge, 1935.

Baber, R. E., Marriage and the Family, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

Bartlett, George A., Men, Women & Conflict, Putnam, 1932.

Beard, Mary, Woman: Co-maker of History, Longmans, 1940.

Bernard, Jessie, American Family Behavior, Harper, 1942.

Binkley, R. C., What Is Right With Marriage, Appleton-Century, 1929.

Bowman, H. A., Marriage for Moderns, McGraw-Hill, 1942.

Briffault, Robert, The Mothers, 3 Vols., Macmillan, 1927.

Burgess, E. W., and Cottrell, L. S., Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage,
Prentice-Hall, 1940.

Butterfield, Oliver, Sex Life in Marriage, Emerson Books, 1937.

Calhoun, A. W., A Social History of the American Family, Clark, 1917.

Calverton, V. F., The Bankruptcy of Marriage, Macaulay, 1928.

Cavan, R. S., The Family, Crowell, 1942.

Colcord, J. S., article, "Family Desertion," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

, Broken Homes, Russell Sage Foundation, 1919.

Davis, K. B., Factors in the Sex Life of 2,200 Women, Harper, 1921.

Dickinson, R. L., and Beam, Laura, The Single Woman, Williams & Wilkins,
1934.

Elmer, M. C., Family Adjustment and Social Change, Long & Smith, 1932.

Fiske, G. W., The Changing Family, Harper, 1928.

Goodsell, Willystine, History of the Family as a Social and Educational Institu-
tion, Macmillan, 1915.

— • • , Problems of the Family, Appleton-Century, 1928.

Groves, E. R., Social Problems of the Family, Lippincott, 1927.

, The Marriage Crisis, Longmans, Green, 1928.

, Wholesome Marriage, Houghton Mifflin, 1927.

, Marriage, Holt, 1933.

, Sex in Marriage, Emerson Books, 1940.

, The American Woman, Greenberg, 1936.

, and Ogburn, W. F., American Marriage and Family Relationships,

Holt, 1928.

Groves, G. H., and Ross, R. A., The Married Woman, Blue Ribbon Books, 1939.

Gwynne, W.,, Divorce in America under State and Church, Macmillan, 1925.

904 SELECTED REFERENCES

Hamilton, G. V., A Research in Marriage, Boni, 1929.

• , and Macgowan, Kenneth, W hat Is Wrong With Marriage, Boni,

1929.

Hankins, F. H., "Divorce/' Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. "Illegitimacy,"
Ibid.

Hayden, J, F., The Art of Marriage, Union Library Association, 1938.

Holmes, J. H., Marriage and Divorce, Huebsch, 1913.

Howard, G. E., A History of Matrimonial Institutions, 3 Vols., University of
Chicago Press, 1904.

llutchiris, Grace, Women Who Work, International Publishers, 1934.

Jung, Moses, Modern Marriage, Crofts, 1940.

Keczer, F. II., A Treatise on the Law of Marriage and Divorce, Bebbs-Merrill,
1923.

Kitchin, S. B., A History of Divorce, London, 1912.

Knox, S. T., The Family and the Law, University of North Carolina Press, 1941.

LaFollette, Suzanne, Concerning Women, Boni, 1926.

Levy, John, and Munroe, Ruth, The Happy Family, Knopf, 1940.

Lichtenberger, J. P., Divorce, McGraw-Hill, 193L

Lindsey, Cornpanionate Marriage.

Mangold, G. B,, Children Born Out of Wedlock, University of Missouri Press,
1921.

May, Geoffrey, Marriage Laws and Decisions in the United States, Russell Sage
Foundation, 1929.

Mencken, H. L., In Defense of Women, Garden City Pub. Co., 1931.

Messer, M. B., The Family in the Making, Putnam, 1925.

Morgan, W. L., The Family Meets the Depression, University of Minnesota
Press, 1939.

Mowrer, E. R., Family Disorganization, University of Chicago Press, 1927.

• , Domestic Discord, University of Chicago Press, 1928.

Muller-Lyer, Franz, The Evolution of Modern Marriage, Knopf, 1930.

Neumann, Henry, Modern Youth and Marriage, Appleton, 1928.

Nimkoff, M. F., The Family, Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

Oglesby, Catharine, Business Opportunities for Women, Harper, 1937.

Popenoe, Paul, Conservation of the Family, Williams & Wilkins, 1926.

Pruette, Lorine, Women Workers Through the Depression, Macmillan, 1934.

Reed, Ruth, The Modern Family, Crofts, 1929.

Renter, E. B., and Runner, J. R., The Family, McGraw-Hill, 1931.

Russell, Bertrand, Marriage and Morals, Liveright, 1929.

, Divorce, Day, 1930.

Schneider, D. M., and Deutsch, Albert, History of Public Welfare in New York
State, 1867-1940, University of Chicago Press, 1941.

Sellin, J. T., Marriage and Divorce Legislation in Sweden, University of Minne-
sota Press, 1922.

Stekel, Wilhelm, Marriage at the Crossroads, Godwin, 1931.

Stern, B. J., The Family, Past and Present, Appleton-Century, 1938.

Stone, Hannah and Abraham, Marriage Manual, Simon & Schuster, 1935.

Stouffer, S. A., and Lazarsfeld, P. F., Research Memorandum on the Family in
the Depression, Social Science Research Council, 1937.

Thomas, W. L, The Unadjusted Girl, Little, Brown, 1923.

, The Child in America, 1928.

Tietz, E. B., and Weichert, C. Kv The Art and Science of Marriage, McGraw-
Hill, 1938.

SELECTED REFERENCES 905

Van der Welde, T. H., Ideal Marriage, Covici, Freide, 1930.
Waller, Willard, The Family, Cordon, 1938.

Westermarck, Edward, A History of Human Marriage, 3 Vols., Macmillan, 1921.
Wile, I. S., et al., Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult, Vanguard, 1934.
Winter, Ella, Red Virtue, Harcourt, Brace, 1933.

Zimmerman, C. C., and Frampton, M. E., Family and Society, Van Nostrand,
1935.

CHAPTER 16

Apstein, The Parting of the Ways.

Blumenthal, Albert, Small-Town Stuff, University of Chicago Press, 1932.

Bossard, Social Change and Social Problems.

Burr, Walter, Rural Organization, Macmillan, 1921.

Cavan, R. S., and Ranck, K. H., The Family and the Depression, University of

Chicago Press, 1938.

Clarke, I. C., The Little Democracy, Appleton-Century, 1918.
Colcord, Broken Homes.

, Your Community, Russell Sage Foundation, 1939.

Cook, L. A., The Community Background of Education, McGraw-Hill, 1938.
DeSchweinitz, Karl, The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble, Houghton

Mifflin, 1924.

Elliott, M. A., and Merrill, F. E., Social Disorganization, Harper, 1941.
Engelhardt, N. L., Planning the Community School, American Book Company,

1940.

Gilbert, G. B., The Country Preacher, Harper, 1940.
Goodsell, Willystine, Problems of the Family, Appleton-Century, 1936.
Hart, Hastings and E. B., Personality and the Family, Heath, 1935.
Hart, J. K., Community Organization, Macmillan, 1920.
Hayes, A. W., Rural Community Organization, University of Chicago Press,

1921.

Hertzler, A. E., The Horse and Buggy Doctor, Doubleday, Doran, 1939.
Lee, Joseph, Play in Education, Macmillan, 1915.
Lichtenberger, Divorce.

Lindeman, E. C., The Community, Association Press, 1921.
Lumpkin, K. D., The Family, University of North Carolina Press, 1933.
Lutes, D. T., The Country Kitchen, Little, Brown, 1936.

, Home Grown, Little, Brown, 1938.

, Country Schoolma'am, Little, Brown, 1941.

McClenahan, B. A., Organizing the Community, Appleton-Century, 1922.
, The Changing Urban Neighborhood, University of Southern Cali-
fornia Press, 1929.
Mowrer, Family Disorganization.

, Disorganization: Personal and Social, Lippincott, 1942.

Osborn, L. D., Community and Society, American Book Company, 1933.
Partridge, Country Lawyer.

Phillips, W. C., Adventuring for Democracy, Social Unit Press, 1940.
Queen, S. A., et al, Social Organization and Disorganization, Crowell, 1935.
Rainwater, C. E., Community Organization, University of Southern California

Press, 1920.
, The Play Movement in the United States, University of Chicago

Press, 1922.

906 SELECTED REFERENCES

Sanderson, D. L., The Rural Community, Ginn, 1932.
Shaler, N. S., The Neighbor, Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Sorokin, P. A., and Zimmerman, C. C., Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology,

Holt, 1929.
Steiner, J. F., The American Community in Action, Appleton-Century, 1928.

, Community Organization, Appleton-Century, 1930.

, America at Play, McGraw-Hill, 1933.

Stern, The Family, Past and Present.

Taylor, C. C., Rural Sociology, Harper, 1933.

Terpenning, Walter, Village and Open-country Neighborhoods, Appleton-

Ccntury, 1931.

Ward, E. J., The Social Center, Appleton-Century, 1913.
Warner, W. L., and Lunt, P. S., The Social Life of a Modern Community, Yale

University Press, 1941.

Wood, A. E., Community Problems, Appleton-Century, 1928.
Woods, R. A., The Neighborhood in Nation Building, Houghton Mifflin, 1923.
Zimmerman, C. C., The Changing Community, Harper, 1938.

CHAPTER 17

Aubrey, E. A., Present Theological Tendencies, Harper, 1936.

Barbour, C. E., Sin and the New Psychology, Abingdon Press, 1930.

Barnes, H. E., Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, Reynal
and Hitchcock, 1941.

, The Twilight of Christianity.

Betts, The Beliefs of Seven Hundred Ministers.

Braden, C. S., Varieties of American Religion, Willett, Clark, 1936.

Briffault, Robert, Sin and Sex, Macaulay, 1931.

Browne, Lewis, This Believing World, Macmillan, 1927.

Burtt, E. A., Religion in an Age of Science, Stokes, 1929.

, Types of Religious Philosophy, Harper, 1939.

Calverton, V, F., The Passing of the Gods, Scribner, 1934.

Cantril, Hadley, The Psychology of Social Movements, Wiley, 1941.

ChafTee, E. B., The Protestant Churches and the Industrial Crisis, Macmillan,
1933.

Cooper, C. C., ed., Religion and the Modern Mind, Harper, 1929.

Darnell, T. W., After Christianity— What f Brewer and Warren, 1930.

Douglass, H. P., and Brunner, E. S., The Protestant Church as a Social Institu-
tion, Harper, 1935.

Drake, Durant, The New Morality, Macmillan, 1928.

Ellwood, C. A.> The Reconstruction of Religion, Macmillan, 1922.

Ferm, V. T. A., Contemporary American Theology, Round Table Press, 1932.

Flower, J. C., An Approach to the Psychology of Religion, Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

Fosdick, H. E., As I See Religion, Harper, 1932.

Friess, H. L., and Schneider, H. L., Religion in Various Cultures, Holt, 1932.

Givler, R. C., The Ethics of Hercules, Knopf, 1922.

Haydon, A. E., Biography of the Gods, Macmillan, 1940.

Hobhouse, L. T., Morals in Evolution, Holt, 1915.

Kallen, H. M., Why Religion? Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Kirkpatrick, Clifford, Religion in Human Affairs, Wiley, 1929.

Kirchwey, Freda, ed., Our Changing Morality, Boni, 1924.

Lake, Kirsopp, The Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow, Houghton Mifflin,
1925.

SELECTED REFERENCES 907

Lament, Corliss, The Illusion of Immortality, Putnam, 1935.

Leuba, J. H., God or Man? Holt, 1933.

Levy, Hyman, The Universe of Science, Appleton-Century, 1933.

Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Morals, Macmillan, 1929.

Lowie, R. H., Primitive Religion, Boni & Liveright, 1924.

Martin, E. D., The Mystery of Religion, Harper, 1924.

May, M. A., Studies in the Nature of Character, Macmillan, 1928.

Maynard, Theodore, The Story of American Catholicism, Macmillan, 1941.

McGiffert, A. C., History of Christian Thought, 2 Vols., Scribner, 1932.

, Protestant Thought Before Kant, Scribner, 1915.

Myers, P. V. N., History as Past Ethics, Ginn, 1913.
O'Toole, G. B., The Case Against Evolution, Macmillan, 1925.
Parshley, H. N., Science and Good Behavior, Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
Potter, C. F., Humanism, Simon & Schuster, 1930.

, Humanizing Religion, Harper, 1933.

Radin, Paul, Primitive Religion, Viking, 1937.

Randall, J. H., and J. H., Jr., Religion and the Modern World, Stokes, 1929.

Reese, C. W., Humanist Sermons, Open Court, 1927.

Rice, W. N., Christian Faith in an Age of Science, Doran, 1903.

Robinson, The Human Comedy.

Rogers, A. K., Morals in Review, Macmillan, 1927.

Russell, Bcrtrand, Religion and Science, Holt, 1935.

Russell, Dora, The Right to Be Happy, Harper, 1927.

Shapley, Harlow, Flights from Chaos, McGraw-Hill, 1930.

Shipley, The War on Modern Science.

Shotwell, J. T., The Religious Revolution of Today, Iloughton Mifflin, 1915.

Sumner, Folkways.

Trattncr, E. R., Unraveling the Book of Books, Scribner, 1929.

Tufts, J. H., America's Social Morality, Holt, 1933.

Wallis, W. D., Religion in Primitive Society, Crofts, 1939.

Ward, H. F., Which Way Religion? Macmillan, 1931.

Williams, Michael, and Kernan, Julia, The Catholic in Action, Macmillan, 1934.

CHAPTER 18

Beale, H. K., Are American Teachers Freef Scribners, 1936.

Buchholz, H. E., Fads and Fallacies in Present-day Education, Macmillan, 1931.

Burnham, W. H., The Great Teachers and Mental Health, Appleton, 1926.

Butts, R. F., The College Charts Its Course, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

Coe, G. A., Educating for Citizenship, Scribner, 1932.

Coon, Money to Burn.

Corbally, J. E., and Bolton, F. E. Educational Sociology, American Book Com-
pany, 1941.

Counts, G. S., The American Road to Culture, Day, 1930.

, The Social Foundations of Education, Scribner, 1934.

, The Prospects of American Democracy.

< , The Schools Can Teach Democracy.

Curti, M. E., The Social Ideals of American Education, Scribner, 1935.

Douglass, H. R., Secondary Education for Youth in America, National Council
on Education, 1937.

908 SELECTED REFERENCES

Eby, Frederick, and Arrowwood, C. F., The History and Philosophy of Educa-
tion, Ancient and Medieval, Prentice-Hall, 1940.

, The Development of Modern Education, Prentice-Hall, 1937.

Elsbree, W. S., The American Teacher, American Book Company, 1939.

Ely, Mary, ed., Adult Education in Action, Am. Assoc. for Adult Education, 1936.

GeUermari, William, The American Legion as Educator, Teachers College Publi-
cations, 1938.

Gulick, L. H., Education for American Life, McGraw-Hill, 1938.

llambidge, Gove, New Aims in Education, McGraw-Hill, 1940.

Hansome, Marius, World Workers Education Movements, Columbia University
Press, 1931.

Hewitt, Dorothy, and Mather, K. F., Adult Education, Appleton-Century, 1937.

Hollis, E. V., Philanthropic Foundations and Higher Education, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1938.

Judd, C. H., Education and Social Progress, Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

Kallen, H. M., Education, the Machine and the Worker, New Republic Press,
1925.

Keppel, F. P,, Education for Adults, Columbia University Press, 1926.

, Philanthropy and Learning, Columbia University Press, 1936.

, The Foundation, Macmillan, 1930.

Kilpatrick, W. H., et al, The Educational Frontier, 1933.

Langford, H. D., Education and the Social Conflict, Macmillan, 1936.

Leary, D. B., Living and Learning, Smith, 1931.

Lindeman, E. C., Social Education, New Republic Press, 1933.

Lynd, Knowledge for What?

Mailer, J. B., School and Community, McGraw-Hill, 1938.

Martin, E. D., The Meaning of a Liberal Education, Norton, 1926.

McConn, C. M., College or Kindergarten? New Republic Press, 1928.

Meiklejohn, Alexander, The Experimental College, Harper, 1932.

Melvin, A. G., The Technique of Progressive Teaching, Day, 1932.

Morgan, J. E., Horace Mann, National Home Library, 1936.

, The Life of Horace Mann, National Education Association, 1937.

Mort, P. R., American Schools in Transition, Teachers College, 1941.

Myers, A. F., and Williams, C. 0., Education in a Democracy (with revisions),
Prentice-Hall, 1942.

Newlon, J. H., Education for Democracy in Our Time, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

.Norton, T. L., Education for Work, McGraw-Hill, 1938.

Osborne, A. E., An Alternative for Revolution and War, Educational Screen, 1939.

Pressey, S. L., Psychology and the New Education, Harper, 1933.

Raup, Bruce, Education and Organized Interests in America, Putnam, 1936.

Rugg, Harold, Culture and Education in America, Harper, 1935.

, That Men May Understand, Doubleday, Doran, 1941.

Russell, Bertrand, Education and the Modern World, Norton, 1932.

Schmalhausen, S. D., Humanizing Education, New Education Press, 1926.

Sinclair, Upton, The Goose-step, Sinclair, 1923.

Smith, Harvey, The Gang's All Here, Princeton University Press, 1941.

Snedden, David, What's Wrong with American Education? Lippincott, 1927.

Spaulding, Francis, The High School and Life, McGraw-Hill, 1938.

Tugwell, R. G., and Keyserling, L. H., eds., Redirecting Education, 2 Vols.,
Columbia University Press, 1934.

Tunis, J. R., Was College Worth While? Harcourt, Brace, 1936.

Tuttle, H. S., A Social Basis of Education, Crowe!!, 1934.

SELECTED REFERENCES 909

Waller, Willard, The Sociology of Teaching, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1932.
Washburne, Carleton, Remakers of Mankind, Day, 1932.
Wo<fdy, Thomas, New Minds, New Men, Macmillan, 1932.

CHAPTER 19

Appleton, L. E., A Comparative Study of the Play Activities of Adult Savages

and Civilized Children, University of Chicago Press, 1910.
Barnes, Can Man Be Civilized?

Barzun, Jacques, Of Human Freedom, Little, Brown, 1939.
Bekker, Paul, The Story of Music, Norton, 1927.

Bemis, A. F., and Burchard, John, The Evolving House, Technology Press, 1933.
Burns, C. D., Leisure in the Modern World, Appleton-Century, 1932.
Cheney, Sheldon, The Theatre, Longmans, 1929.

— , The Story of Modern Art, Viking Press, 1941.

Craven, Thomas, Men of Art, Simon & Schuster, 1931.

, Modern Art, Simon & Schuster, 1934.

De Rougemont, Denis, Love in the Western World, Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

Dulles, F. R., America Learns to Play, Appleton-Century, 1940.

Elson, Arthur, The Book of Musical Knowledge, Houghton Mifflin, 1927.

Ewen, David, Music Comes to America, Crowell, 1942.

Faulkner, Ray, Ziegfield, Edwin and Hill, Gerald, Art Today, Holt, 1941.

Faure, Elie, Ancient Art, Harper, 1921.

Feldman, H. A., Music and the Listener, Norton, 1940.

Gardner, Helen, Art Through the Ages, Harcourt, Brace, 1926.

Gassner, John, Masters of the Drama, Random House, 1940.

Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture, Harvard University Press, 1941.

Gilbert, K. E., and Kuhn, Helmut, A History of Aesthetics, Macmillan, 1939.

Gray, Cecil, The History of Music, Knopf, 1928.

Greenbie, M. B., The Arts of Leisure, McGraw-Hill, 1937.

Groos, Karl, The Play of Animals, Appleton-Century, 1898.

, The Play of Man, Appleton-Century, 1901.

Grousset, Rene, Civilizations of the East, 3 Vols., Knopf, 1941.

Hambidge, Gove, Time to Live, McGraw-Hill, 1933.

Hamlin, A. D. F., History of Architecture, Longmans, 1925.

Harrison, Jane, Ancient Art and Ritual, Holt, 1913.

Hitchcock, H. R., In the Nature of Materials, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942.

Hoffman, Malvina, Sculpture, Inside Out, Norton, 1939.

Howard, J. T., Our Contemporary Composers, Crowell, 1941.

Jacks, L. P., The Education of the Whole Man, Harper, 1933.

Johnson, Philip, Machine Art, Norton, 1934.

Keppel, F. P., and Duffus, R. L., The Arts in American Life, McGraw-Hill, 1933.

Kieran, John, and Golinkin, J. W., The American Sporting Scene, Macmillan, 1941.

Krout, J. A., Annals of American Sport, Yale University Press, 1929.

Lang, Music in Western Civilization.

Lee, Play in Education.

Loeb, Life in a Technocracy.

Lundberg (F), America's Sixty Families.

Lundberg, G. A., Leisure: A Suburban Study, Columbia University Press, 1934.

Marquand, Allan and Frothingham, A. L., History of Sculpturet Longmans, 1912.

McMahon, A. P., The Art of Enjoying Art, McGraw-Hill, 1938.

910 SELECTED REFERENCES

Maurois, Andre, The Art of Living, Harper, 1940.

Nash, J. B., Organization and Administration of Playgrounds, Barnes, 1927.
, Spectatoritis, Sears, 1932. *

Nef, Karl, An Outline of the History of Music, Columbia University Press, 1935.
Orton, W. A., America in Search of Culture, Little, Brown, 1933.
Overmyer, Grace, Government and the Arts, Norton, 1939.
Pack, A. N., The Challenge of Leisure, Macmillan, 1934.
Patrick, G. T. W., The Psychology of Relaxation, Houghton Mifflin, 1916.
Rainwater, The Play Movement in the United States.
Read, H. E., Art and Industry, Hurcourt, Brace, 1935.
Reinach, Solomon, Apollo, Scribner, 1914.

Rice, E. A., A Brief History of Physical Education, Barnes, 1926.
Ruckstull, F. W., Great Works of Art, Garden City, 1925.
Saint-Gaudens, Homer, The American Artist and His Times, Dodd, Mead, 1941.
Steiner, J. F., America at Play, McGraw-Hill, 1933.
Tallmadge, T. E., The Story of Architecture in America, Norton, 1927.
Terry, Walter, Invitation to Dance, Barnes, 1942.
Tomans, A. S., Introduction to the Sociology of Art, Columbia University Press,

1941.

Van Dyke, J. C., History of Painting, Longmans, 1915.
Venturi, Lionello, Art Criticism Now, Johns Hopkins Press, 1942.
Waterhouse, P. L., The Story of Building, Appleton-Century, 1927.
Welch, R. D., The Study of Music in the American College, Smith College Press,

1925.

Whitaker, C. H., The Story of Architecture, Halcyon House, 1934.
Wren, C. G., and Harley, D. L., Time on Their Hands, National Council on

Education, 1941.

Wright, F. L., Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1941.
Young, C. V. P., How Men Have Lived, Stratford, 1931.

CHAPTER 20

Albig, Public Opinion.

Barnes, Can Man Be Civilized f

, Living in the Twentieth Century.

-, , The Twilight of Christianity.

Beaglehole, Property.

Beard, A History of the Business Man.

Bossard, Man and His World.

Burnham, The Managerial Revolution.

Burns, Leisure in the Modern World.

Chamberlain, John, The American Stakes, Carrick & Evans, 1940.

Chase, Stuart, The Most Probable Tomorrow, Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

Cole, A Guide to Modern Politics.

• , A Guide Through World Chaos.

Cooley, Social Organization.

Counts, The Prospects of American Democracy.

Davis, Capitalism and Its Culture.

Dennis, The Dynamics of War and Revolution.

Doob, Propaganda.

Drake, The New Morality.

SELECTED REFERENCES 911

Dulles, America Learns to Play.

Ernst and Lindey, The Censor Marches On.

Fodor, The Revolution Is On.

Freeman, Conquering the Man on the Street.

Furnas, C. C., The Next Hundred Years, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936.

Gore, Property.

Grattan, Preface to Chaos.

Hallgren, Landscape of Freedom.

Hayes, Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism.

Howe, The News and How to Understand It.

Huberman, Man's Worldly Goods.

Hertzler, Social Institutions.

Jackson, Look at the Law.

Jenks, Man and the State.

Keller, Man's Rough Road.

Keppel and Duff us, The Arts in American Life.

Langdon-Davies, A Short History of the Future.

Laski, H. J., Where Do We Go From Here? Viking, 1940.

Lichtenberger, Divorce.

Lundbcrg, America's Sixty Families.

Lynd, Knowledge for What?

Marshall, The Story of Human Progress.

McConn, College or Kindergarten?

McVey, Modern Industrialism.

Newlon, Education for Democracy in Our Time.

Ogburn, Social Change.

, and Nimkoff, Sociology.

Ogg and Sharp, The Economic Development of Modern Europe.

Overmyer, Government and the Arts.

Penman, The Irresistible Movement of Democracy.

Pink, A Realist Looks at Democracy.

Porritt, The Causes of War.

Potter, Humanism.

Randall, Our Changing Civilization.

, Religion and the Modern World.

Riegel, Mobilizing for Chaos.

Sait, Political Institutions.

Sargent, Getting US Into War.

Schmalhausen, Humanizing Education.

Smith, The Devil of the Machine Age.

Sorokin, P. A., The Crisis of Our Age, Dutton, 1941.

Soule, George, The Strength of Nations, Macmillan, 1942.

Steiner, America at Play.

Waller, The Family.

Willey and Rice, Communication Agencies and Social Life.

Wright, The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace.

INDEX

Index

Abelard, Peter, 730

Abuses of property, 195-197

Academic freedom, problems of, 787—791

Activities, human, arising from needs,
24-29

Act of Settlement, 295

Adams, Charles Francis, 802

Adams, Evangeline, 523

Adams, John, 234, 299

Adler, Alfred, 22, 814

Adler, Felix, 691

Administration of public education, 741-
742

Adult education, 745-740, 778-781

Advanced Modernists, doctrine of, 691-
092

Advertising, radio, 517, 524

AFL, see American Federation of Labor

Agar, Herbert, 279

Age, as industrial and social problem,
150-158

Agricultural Revolution, 71, 78-81

Agriculture, changes since first World
War, 84-85; control, forms of, 103-
104 ; development of, 24 ; Greek and
Roman, 72— <4; mechanization of, 81—
84; medieval, 74-78; Near East, an-
cient, 70-72; origins of, 69-70

Airplanes, development of, 474-476

Air warfare, 318-321

Alexander the Great, 311-312

Alimony, problem of, 633

Allen, Florence, 616

Allport, Floyd H., 808-809

Alphabet, origins of, 453-454

American Association for Adult Educa-
tion, 779

American Association for the Advance-
ment of Atheism, 692

American Association of University Pro-
fessors, 789

American Automobile Association, 830

American Civil Liberties Union, 305, 593—
594, 790, 791

American Federation of Labor, 14, 150

American Federation of Teachers, 786,
792-793

American Lawn Tennis Association, 828

American Student Union, 791

American Tobacco Company, 124

Analytical jurisprudence, 371

Anderson, Paul Y., 559-560

Angell, Norman, 274, 336, 348

Animals, use in agriculture, 70, 72, 74,
76-77

Anthony, Susan B.t 617

Anti-Semitism, prejudice of, 542

Appleby, John F., 82

Aquinas, Thomas, 211

915

Architecture, development of, 844-846,
848, 851

Arkwright, Richard, 94, 107

Armament race, 345

Armstrong, Edwin H., 515

Arnold, Thurman, 158

Art, censorship of, 577-580; contempo-
rary American, trends in. 850-860;
development of, 6, 839-844; federal
encouragement of, 850-857 ; growth of,
in U. S., 844-850 ; leisure-time activity,
838-839

Aryan hegemony in Germany, 8, 330

Assizes of Jerusalem and Antioch, 365

Associated Press, 493

Associations, form of social organization.
15-16

Assyria, ancient, see Near East

Atheism, doctrines of, 692

Athenian society, see Greek society

Athletics, historical survey of, 818-823;
in modern education, 761-763

Atlantic cable, 478-479

Atwood, Harry F., 383

Austin, John, 371

Automobiles, development of, 471-472

Aylesworth, M. E., 593

Ayres, Stuart, 546

B

Babson, Roger, 472

Babylonia, ancient, see Near East

Bachofen, J. J., 602

Bacon, Francis, 456

Baer, George F., 59

Bagehot, Walter, 205

Bakewell, Robert, 79

Baldwin, Roger, 305

Bank failures, 133

Bank holiday, 50-51

Banning, Margaret Culkin, 570

Bar Association of New York, 433

"Bargain-counter justice," 435

Barnard, George Grey, 849

Barnard, Henry, 732

Barnes, Albert C., 849

Barrett, Boyd, 711

Bartlett, George A., 628

Bartlett, Kenneth G., 525

Barton, Bruce, 551, 565

Baseball, growth of, 823, 836

Basketball, development of, 824

Bayle, Pierre, 681, 685

Beaglehole, Ernest, 164-165

Beale, Howard K., 787-788

Beard, Charles A., 230, 254

Beck, James M., 227, 252

Becker, Carl Lotus, 214, 758

Bedford, Duke of, 79

916

INDEX

Beecher, Catherine E., 825

Behavior, human, change hi, 35-38

Bell, Alexander Graham, 407, 480

Bellamy, Edward, 51

Bellows, George, 343

Bell Telephone Company, 483

Bennett, James Gordon, 480, 489

Bentham, Jereinv, 370. 371, 717

Bentley, A. F., 230, 333

Benton, Thomas Hart, 343, 849, 850

Berle, Idolph A., 182, 199, 417-418, 420,

445

Bernays, Edward L., 478, 568
Bessemer, Sir Henry, 95
Belts, George Herbert, 689
Bickel, Karl W., 495, 530
Bill of Eights, 294-295
Bill of Bights for Teachers, 790-791
Binder, twine, invention of, 82
Biological causes of war, 32C-330
Birth-control movement, 617
Black, Hugo L., 414
Black, W. P., 432
Blackatone, William, 160, 177, 368
Blaushard, Paul, 700
Bleriot, Louis, 474
Hlitzkrie.g, methods of, 818-319
Bloc system, party politics, 232
Blount, Charles, 575
Blum, !Le"on, 349
Boas, Franz, 44, 603
Bonds, social, types of, 7-10
Bonger, W. A., 718
Bonuses, excessive, mismanagement,

through, 131
Books, censorship of, 577-580; rise of

communication through, 460-463
Borchard, Edwin M., 442
Borsodi, Ralph, 844
Boss controlled politics. 241-243
Bourgeois revolution, 55
Bowles, Samuel, 488
Boxing, development of, 836-837
Brady, "Diamond Jim," 167
Brailsford, H. N., 196, 216
Brandeis, Louis D., 411, 414, 421
Breasted, James H., 546, 680, 799
Bridgewater, Duke of, 95
Briffault, Robert, 602
Brindley, James, 95
Brinkley, J. R., 594
British income tax, compared with U. S.,

145

'Bromley, Dorothy Dunbar, 396-398
Broun, Heywood, 577
Browder, Earl, 592, 593
Brown, Rollo Walter, 710-711
Brown, V. K., 833
Brunner, Heinrich, 371
Bruno, Giordano, opposition to, 53
Brutalization, effect of warfare, 342
Brvan, William Jennings, 62, 348, 548,

688

Bryant, William Cullen, 488
Bryce, James, 273, 286-287
Buchman, Frank N. D., 693
Buck, A. E., 254

Budget and Accounting Act, 253-254
Burke, Edmund, 371
Business propaganda, 564-569 rt^rt AM
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 281, 348, 403,

562

Butler, Pierce, 414
Bye, Raymond T., 139

Byrd, Richard, 464
Byrnes, James F., 414

C

Cables, communication, 478-479

Cadinan, S. Parkes, 593

Calcord, Joanna C., 642

Caldwell, Erskiue, 577

Calhoun, Arthur W., 184 295

Cameron, William J., 155, 567-568, 803

Camp, Walter C., 823

Campbell. Marcus B., 390

Canals, development of, 95

Cannon law, Catholic, in Middle Ages,
365-367

Capella, Martinus, 729

Capitalism, appraisal of crisis in, SOS-
SCO; ascendency of, 125-127; defects
in, 127-137; evolution of, 122-125; in
ancient world, 115-116; industrial,
137-139; outlook for, in TJ. S., 158-
159 ; problems of, 149-1 53 ; property
under, 180-185 ; rise of, historical back-
ground, 115-121 ; traits and practices
of, 119-120; value of, to society, 146-
149

Cardozo, Benjamin, 399

Carnegie, Andrew, 124, 348

Carter, James Gordon, 371, 732

Cartoons, animated, 853

Cartwright, Alexander J., 823

Cartwright, Edmund, 94

Catholic Social Welfare Council, 699

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 617

Censors, types of, 576-577

Censorship, appraisal of crisis in, 872-
874; art, books, theater. 577-580;
history and nature of, 573-576; libel
racket, 580-581; motion-picture, 585-
591 ; of broadcasting, 522 ; political,
581-585 ; radio, 591-594 ; remedies for,
596-597; types of censors, 576-577

Cermak, A. J,, 258

Chafee, Zechariah, Jr., 446-447

Chain-stores, development of, 102

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 330

Chamberlin, William Henry, 216, 274,
286

Change, social, and education, 772-778

Chase, Stuart, 136, 138-139, 457-459

Chase National Bank, 124

Chemistry, applied to industry, 95-96

Cheyney, E. P., 214

Child labor, 646

Child problems, 645-648

Children's Aid Society of New York,
646-647

Childs, Marquis W., 475

Choate, Joseph H., 406-407

Christian art, 841-842

Christian synthesis, the, 678-683

Christianity, divorce, attitude toward,
620-621; nature of, 678-683

Churchill, Winston, 168

CIO, see Congress of Industrial Organ-
izations

City life, impact of, effect on rural life
patterns, 662-664

City planning, 845, 848, 851

City-states, early, government of, 202-
205

Civilian Conservation Corps, 635, 646

INDEX

917

Civilization, lawyer-made, 353-355; on
eupra-pig level, 795-797

Civil liberties, contemporary crisis of,
296^306; crisis in, 306-308; historical
origins of, 292-296; laws and court
cases destroying, 298-299; nature of,
290-292; struggle for, 290-308; war
influence on, 343

Civil-service system, growth of, 252

Clark, Harold F., 83-84

Clarke, Edward Y.. 688

Classes, social and economic, prejudices
of, 535-536

Clean, fundamental religious concept, 677

Close, Upton, 523

Code Napoleon, 370

Cohen, Julius Henry, 419

Coke, first use of, 94-95

Coke, Thomas, 80

Coleman, Lawrence, 859

Collective bargaining, 149-150

Colleges, development of, 738-739

Collins, Anthony, 685

Columbia Broadcasting System, 517, 519,
592

Conienius, Johann Amos, 731

Commentators, radio, influence of, 523

Commerce, development of, 98—102

Commercial Revolution, 80

Common law, English, growth of, 367-
368

Commonwealth Fund, 646

Communication, agencies of, development,
464-467; alphabet, origins of, 453-
454; appraisal of crisis in, 872-873;
development of, 26-27 ; language, ori-
gins of, 450-453: language, social and
intellectual problems of, 454-459;
means of, progress in, 47o-487 ; mod-
ern, revolutionary character of, 463-
464 ; motion pictures as factor in. 505—
514 ; newspaper as means of, 487—503 ;
periodical press, 503-505 ; postal serv-
ice. 485—487 ; printing, invention of,
460-463 ; radio, development of, 514-
530; rise of, through books and print-
ing, 460-463; social future and, 530-
532; telegraphic, 476-480; telephonic,
480-485; television, 527-530; travel
and transportation, improvements in,
467-471 ; written language, origins of,
453-454

Communism, defined, 114-115

Community, form of social organization,
15

Community < life, meaning of, 649-650;
organization supplants primary groups,
664-666

Comparative school of jurisprudence,
371-372

Composers, American, 850

Comstock, Anthony, 577, 579, 844

Comstock Law, 576

Comte, August, 19, 39Z 47

Conduct, historical attitudes toward, 714-
718

Congress of Industrial Organizations, 14,
150, 231

Conrad, Lawrence, 806-807

Conscription, military, 324-325

Constitutional government, rise of, 221-
228

Constitutional law, 406-417

Constitutions, modern, 223-224

Control, industrial, forms of, 103-111;

social, modes of, 18—19
Cook, Whitfield, 524-525
Cooley, Charles H., 13, 14, 279, 650, 651
Coolidge, Calvin, 551
Coon, Horace, 568, 802
Coordinator of Information, 563
Coquille. Guy, 369
Corey. Lewis, 158
Cornell, Ezra, 479

Corporate control of finance, 125-127
Corporation law, 417-426
Corruption under party government, 248-

259

Cort, Henry, 95
Coster, Lourens, 462
Costs of party elections, 243-244
Cotton-gin, invention of, 94
Cotton-picker, invention of, 82
Coughlin, Charles E., 555
Court cases destroying civil liberties, 298-

^t/y
Courtroom procedure, law in, 392-406;

suggested reforms in, 442-449
Cox. Marion, 631
Coyle, David Cushman, 555
Crane, Frederick E., 4zl
Cravath, Paul D., 418
Craven, T. A. M., 464-4652 531
Crime, an inroad on private property,

197; religion, morals and, 712-714
Criminal law, defects of, 432-437
Crompton, Samuel, 94
Cromwell, William Nelson, 419
Cugnot, Joseph, opposition to, 54
Cultural bond, group influence of, 12
Cultural implications of gulf between

machines and institutions, 55—58
Cultural lag, 18
Cultural outlook, common, promotes group

life, 9
Culture, contemporary, institutional lag

in, 58-63 ; impact of war upon, 339-

344 ; prejudices of, 536
Curriculum, development of, in public

education, 743-744
Curtis, Henry S., 831
Custom, prejudices of, 534
Cutten, George Barton, 747
Cylindrical press, introduction of, 491

D

da Feltre, Vittorino, 731

Daguerre, Louis, 506

Dalton system of instruction, 733

Dana, Charles A., 488, 489

Darby, Abraham, 94-95

Darrow, Clarence, 432, 592-593, 688

Darwin, Charles, 38, 40

Daughters of the American Revolution,

299, 305

Davis, Elmer, 331, 523
Davis, Jerome, 793
Davis, John W., 59
Davis, Katharine B., 639
Davis, Kingsley, 631
Davy, Humphry, 80
Dawson, Mitchell, 422
Debs, Eugene V., 273
Debt, public and private, menace of, 133-

134

Declaration of the Rights of Man, 295
de Couvertin, Pierre, 825

918

INDEX

Deering, William, 82

do Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 330

Deists, religious liberals, 685

Democracy, appraisal of crisis in, 809-
870; assumptions of, 274r-278; history
of, 268-274 ; political future and, 287-
290 : propaganda and, 572-573 ; testing
of, 278-290

Democratic party, 237-238

Democratic-Republican party, 237

Dennett, Mary Ware, 578, 580

Depression, periods of. 80-81, 147, 198

de Schweinitz, Karl, 666

Deserted women, family problems of,
641-643

Devout Modernists, doctrine of, 689-691

Dewey, John, 267, 647, 733, 776-777

d'Holhaeh, Baron, 685

Dies Committee, work of, 303-304, 565

Dietrich, John II., 674-675, 701

Dillon, Read and Company, 124

Disarmament conferences, 345-346

Discipline, result of social organization,
17

Disease, effect of war, 343

Disintegration of primary groups, 651-
057

Divorce, causes of, in IT. S., 625-629 ;
extent and prevalence, in U. S., 622-
625 ; legislation and practices, history
of, 618-022; remedies for, 629-633

Doherty, Henry L., 126

Domestic industry, medieval, 90-92, 93

Donovan, William J., 563

Doob, Leonard W., 546

Doubleday, Abner, 823

Douglas, Paul H., 154, 266, 267

Douglas, William O.t 414

Draper, J. W., 506

Drew, Daniel, 131

Drives, basic human, 22-24; property,
165-168

Duff us, Robert L., 537

Dunn, C. V., 713

Dunning, William A., 39

Durant, Will, 278, 279-280

Durkheim, fimile, 15, 201

Dyer, Gus W., 805

E

, Economic causes of war, 333-336
'Economic prejudices, 539

Economic problems, nature of, lld-llD

Economic society, development of, 5-6;
group influence of, 11-12

Eddy, Sherwood, 700

Edison, Thomas A., 54, 506

Edman, Irwin, 838

Education, academic freedom, problems
of, 787-791 ; adult, 77&-781 ; appraisal
of crisis in, 876 ; art, 848 ; as primary
institution, 33-34; contemporary, de-
fects of, 746-763 ; cultural lag of, 61 ;
demoralized by war, 340; history of,
landmarks in, 728-734; importance of
today, 726-728; mass, 734-746; prej-
udices of, 543; propaganda, 571-572;
raids on, 781-787; rational system of,
763-772; scientific study of, 746; so-
cial change and. 772-778; teachers,
organization of, 791-794

Efficiency, social, and institutions, 35-38

Egypt, ancient, see Near East

Eliot, Charles WM 733

Elliott, W. Y., 227

Ely, Richard T., 68

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 845

Employment of women, 613-^618

Enclosures, in English agricultural de-
velopment, 80

Engelbrecht, H. C., 346

Engels, Friedrieh, 779

Engine, internal combustion, development
of, 82; steam, development of, 94

England, democracy in, 271

English political parties, 233-234

Epidemics, effect of war, 343

Epstein, Abraham, 149. 154-155

Equal Rights Law, Wisconsin, 616-617

Ericsson, John, 95

Ernst, Morris L., 578, 680, 585

Estabrook, Henry D., 226

Ethical Culture Society, 691

Ethics, historical attitudes toward, 714-
718

Ethnology, property drives in light of,
165-168

Etiquette, social, prejudices of, 530^

Evolution, agriculture, aspects of, 69-85 ;
capitalism, 122-125; law. 355-370;
manufacturing, trends in, 85-112; so-
cial institutions, 38-47 ; warfare, 311-
326

Experimental schools, 733

Expression, self, basic human drive, 22

Extravagance under party government,
248-259

P

Fabian Society, 779

Factory system, development of, 106-108
Facts and Figures, Office of, 563
Fairchildj Henry Pratt, 809^810 1
Family Me, appraisal of crisis in, 874-
875 ; as primary institution, 32 ; as
social group, 11 ; basis of social or-
ganization, o, 7; child care outside of,
645-648 ; deterioration of, 651-655 ;
development of, 601-613; divorce,
problems of, 618-633 ; evolution of, 46 ;
future of, 633-637; illegitimacy, as
social problem, 643-645; incomes, av-
erage, 143 ; instability of, remedies for,
629-633 ; patriarchal, break-up of, 608-
613; present concept of, 60-61
Faneuil, Peter, 123
Farago, Ladislas, 561
Fascism, denned, 114-115
Fear, group influence of, 12; reaction to,

as psychological bond, 8
Federal Communications Commission,

520-522, 529, 594
Federal Constitution, 295, 381-384
Federal payroll, 249-252
Federal Radio Commission, 520
Federalists, political party, 237
Federated American Engineering Socie-
ties, report on industrial waste, 139-
140

Federation of Teachers' Associations, 793
Feeble-mindedness, study of, 733-734
Fee system, legal practice, 419, 422-424
Feminism, rise of, 613-618
Fertilization, artificial, early use of, 72,
80

INDEX

919

Fetishism, fundamental religious practice,

677-378

Feudal law, 364-305
Feudal politics, medieval Europe, 208-

212

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 455
Field, Cyrus W., 478
Finance capitalism, abuses of, 196 ;

ascendency of, 125-127 ; defects in,

327-137; property under, 180-185
Financial raid on education, 781-783
Fisher, Irving, 218-219
Fiske, Irving, 528-529
Fiske, John, 601
Flick, A. C., 225
Fly, James Lawrence, 521
Flying shuttle, invention of, 94
Flynn, John T.. 130, 158, 258
Follett, M. P., 263

Football, development of, 823-824, 836
Forbes, William HM 483
Ford, Henry, 108, 124, 471
Foreign news, censorship of. 584—585
Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 299-300, 593
Fouillee, Alfred, 20
Foundations of property, psychological,

164-165

Fourteenth Amendment, 183, 297
Fox, William, 419
Fraenkel, Osmond K., 297
France, suffrage in, 271
Frankfurter, Felix, 414
Franklin, Benjamin, 805
Franks, medieval law among, 362-364
Fraudulent elections, 245
Frazer, J. G., 451, 673
Frederick the Great, 732
Freedom of press, 574-575
Free Thinkers Society, 692
French, Daniel Chester, 849
Frequency modulation, development of,

514-515

Froebel, Friedrich, 733
Frozen foods, 84

Functional society, development of, 9
Fundamentalism', doctrine of, 687-689
Furnaces, air-blast, invention of, 95

G

Gantt. Henry L., 108

Garrison, William Lloyd, 548

Gaudet, F. J., 437

Geographic influence, on social develop-
ment, 7 ; on social groups, 10-11 ;
prejudices of, 535

General Motors Corporation, 137

Gerard, James W., 287

German Imperial Code, 370

Germany, censorship in, 582; control of
trade, 110; planned economy, 98;
propaganda in, 556-559 ; recreation in,
825; suffrage in, 271

Gibbons, John M. F.. 396-397

Giddings, Franklin Henry, 8, 14, 15, 19,
39, 240, 268, 533

Gilbreth, Wank B., 108

Gild industry, medieval, 90-91, 105, 110

Ginn, Edward, 563

Girdler, Tom, 149

Gisnet, Morris, 375

Gitlow, Benjamin, 299

Glass industry, development of, 93

Gods, rise of, 674-677

Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 556, 582

Goldberg, Louis P., 401

Goldenweiser, Alexander, 37

Goldman, Emma, 301

Golf, development of, 824

Goodsell, Willistyne, 651-352

Goodyear, Charles, 96

Gorrnley, M. J., 470

Gould, Jay, 131

Government, appraisal of crisis in, 868-
869 ; as social institution, 34 ; develop-
ment of, 27-28 ; evolution of, 46 ; ex-
penditures of, 248—253

Government Reports, Division of, 563

Graft, in party politics, 256-259

Grant, Madison, 330

Gras, N. S. B., 80-81, 127

Gray, Elisha, 480

Greek society, agriculture in, 72-73; art
in, 840-;841 ; capitalism in, 116 ; cen-
sorship in, 573 ; city-states, government
of, 203-205; civil liberties in, 292-
293; commerce and trade, 99, 102;
contributions to Christianity, 681 ; de-
mocracy in, 269 ; divorce in, 619 ; edu-
cation in, 728-729; family in, 606 ;
inheritance of property, 187 ; manufac-
turing in, 88-89 ; property in, 172-174 ;
recreation in, 816, 818; warfare,
methods of, 311-312

Greeley, Horace. 488

Griffith, D. W., ^06

Groos, Karl, 813

Group activity, modes of, 18-19

Group life, foundations of, 7-10

Groups, social, leading forms of, 10-13 ;
primary, 13-14; secondary, 14; we-
groups, 14-15

Gulick, Luther H., 545, 831

(run powder, use in warfare, 316

Gutenberg, Johann, 460, 462

H

Habeas Corpus Act, 294

Habit, prejudices of, 534

Hague, Frank, 259

Haines, Charles G., 60, 406

Hall, Edward J., 483

Hall, G. Stanley, 647, 722, 733, 813

Hall, Joseph, 95

Hamilton, Alexander, 215, 226, 237, 382

Hamilton, Alice, 373, 401

Hamilton, G. V., 639

Hamilton, Walton H., 29, 161, 222

Hamlin, Alfred D. F., 838

Hammurabi, code of, 162, 172, 358

Hancock, John, 123

Hand, Learned, 418

Hanighen, F. C., 346

Hanna, Mark, 243

Hanseatic League, control of trade, 110,

176

Hansen, Alvin H., 158
Harding, Warren G., 242, 349
Hargreaves, James, 94
Harper, Charles Rainey, 744
Harris, G. S., 437
Harrison, Jane, 816
Hartshorne, Hugh, 713
Hartwell, Edward M., 825
Harvesting machines, invention of, 82
Harvey, George, 242
Hatch Acts, 261

920

INDEX

Hayes, Carlton J. H., 219-220, 333

Hays, Will, 587, 589

Hcaly, William, 647

Hearst. William Randolph, 489, 494, 495

Heisenberg, Werner, 758

HelvStius, Claude, 731

Henry II, 367-308

Henry, Patrick, 300, 382

Herbert of Cherburg. Lord, 685

Herrick, Myron T., 242

Herring, E. P., 247

Herroii, Carl V., 338

Hertz, Ileinrich, 479

Hertzler, J. O.. 30, 32

Hewett, W. W*., 139

Hibbard, Angus J., 483

Hightower, P. II., 713

Highways, construction of, 473-474

llifi, Rowland, 486

Hitler, Adolf, 8, 350, 554, 556

Ilobbes, John, 371

Hobhouse, L. T., 194

Hobson, J. A,, 194

Hockey, development of, 824

Hoe culture, 69-70

Holbrook, Stewart H., 307, 308

Holcombe, A. N.f 247, 266

Holding companies, 127-131

Holland, Thomas Erskine, 371

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 301, 399, 413

Holmes, Samuel J., 643-644

Holt, Benjamin, 82

Holy Roman Empire, 210

Hoover, Calvin B., 287

Hoover, Herbert, 59, 139, 147, 242, 796

Hopkins, Ernest Jerome, 433

Hopkins, Harry, 857

Hopkins, Mark, 754

Hopson, Howard, 198

Howard, Roy W., 494, 580

Ho wells, T. H., 713

Hubbard, Elbert, 844

Hughes, Charles Evans, 405, 415

Hull, Cordell, 335

Human behavior, basis of, 10 : change in,

35-38

Human drives, basic, 22-24
Humanism, doctrines of, 691-692, 701
Hume, David, 177, 685, 716
Hussey, L. M., 388
Hussey, Obed, 81-82
Hutchins, Robert M., 772, 790

Illegitimacy, as social problem, 643-645

Incitement to Disaffection Act, 306, 502

Income, classes of, 143—144

Income tax, federal, 145-146

Industrial revolutions, first, 94-95, 219-
220; property after, 178-180; second
and third, 95-98

Industry, appraisal of crisis in, 864-865;
control, forms of, 104-109 ; evolution
of, 46, 66-69 ; Greek, 88-89 ; medieval,
90-92 ; modern, early, 92-93 ; Oriental,
87-88; recreation afforded by, 832;
revolutions. 52-53, 94-102, 219-220;
Roman, 8vM)0; unemployment, 153-
156 ; waste in, 138-139 ; see also Agri-
culture, Manufacturing

Inflation, an inroad on private property,
197-198

In-groups, development of, 14-15

Inheritance of property, 185-189

Innocent III, 211

Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 550,

552, 556, 559, 567, 595
Institute of Social and Religious Re-

search, 713
Institutional lag in contemporary culture,

Institutions, social, appraisal of crisis,
861-864; change in, 35-38; defined,
29-30; development of, 30-31; evolu-
tion of, 38-^7 ; gulf between machines
arid, 52-55 ; impact of urban life on,
657-662; legal criticisms of, 372-377;
machines and, implications of gulf be-
tween, 55-58; panorama of, 22-47;
primary and secondary, 31-35; social
efficiency and, 35-38; warfare as, 321

Insull, Samuel, 198

Interests, human, arising from needs, 24-

Intemational Harvester Company, 124
International Telephone and Telegraph

Corporation, 482
Inventions, 94-97; mechanical, opposi-

tion to, 53-54; stimulated by war, 339
Ise, John, 777
Italy, after first World War, 349-350

Jacks, L. P., 807-808, 811

Jackson, Andrew, party politics and, 236

Jackson. Percival E., 375, 392-393, 420,

431, 442-443

Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 822
James, William, 534
Jastrow, Joseph, 596
Jaures, Jean, 348, 349
Jazz music, 849-850
Jefferson, Thomas, 81, 237, 275-276, 299,

548, 685

Johnson, Andrew, 548
Johnson, Gerald, 595
Jones, Bassett, 134
Jones, Robert M., 388
Jordan, D. S., 329
Josephson, Matthew, 801
Journalism, cultural lag of, 61-62
Judaism, contributions to Christianity,

679-680

Junior colleges, development of, 745
Junior high school, development of, 745
Jury trial, travesty of, 437-442
Justification, social, of property, 189-195
Justinian, code of, 361

K

Knhn, Otto, 128

Kallen, Horace M., 61, 751

Kaltenborn, H. V., 523

Kant, Immanuel, 717

Karolyi, Michael, 301

Kay, John, 94

Kayakawa, S. I., 456, 457

Keith, Arthur, 543-544

Keller, Albert Galloway, 40-42, 160, 166

Kelley, Edward, 579

Kellogg Pact, 347

Kelly, Fred C., 198, 424-425, 456

Kelly, William, 54, 123

Kemal, Mustapha, 606

Kent, Rockwell, 849

INDEX

921

Keynes, J. MM 158

Kindergarten, establishment of, 733

Kinship, as social bond, 7

Kirkpatrick, Clifford, 697-698

Klatt, Ellen, 639

Kohler, Joseph, 371

Kroeber, A. L., 8G

Kuhn, Loeb and Company, 124, 128

Labor, child, 640 ; free, 81 ; organized,
problems of, 149-153; slave, 89-90,
103, 104, 195, 799-800

La Follette, Robert M., 262, 273, 300

La Guardia, Fiorello, 579

Lake, Kirsopp, 703-704

Land transportation, beginnings of, 465—
466

Language, differentiation of, in medieval
culture, 211-212; origins of, 450-453;
social and intellectual problems of,
454-459

Laski, Harold J., 305, 306

Lasswell, Harold D., 196, 546, 562

Lavine, Emanuel, 433

Law, appraisal of crisis in, 870-871 ;
cannon law, Catholic, 361, 365-367;
code of Hammurabi, 162, 172, 358;
common, English, 367-368; constitu-
tional, 406-117; corporation, 417-426;
criminal, defects of, 432-437 ; cultural
Ing of, 60 ; defects in current system,
377-381 ; development of, 6"; evolution
of, 355-370; feudal, 364-365; Franks,
early medieval among, 362-364; insti-
tutions and practices, criticisms of,
372-377; in the courtroom, 392-406;
jury trial, travesty of, 437-442 ; mak-
ing, problems arising out of, 381-391 ;
nioderji times, early, 368—370 ; national,
rise of, 367-368; natural, 406-417;
prejudices of, 540-541; primitive, 355-
358 ; rank-and-file lawyers, activities
and methods of, 426-432 ; Roman, 358-
362 ; theories and schools, modern,
370-372

Law-making, problems arising out of,
381-391

Law Merchant, The, 365

Law schools, 361-362, 370-372

Laws destroying civil liberties, 298—299

Lawyer-made civilization, our, 353-355

Lawyers, rank-and-file, activities and
methods, 426-432

Lawyers' lawyer, 418-419

Lazarus, Moritz, 813

League of Nations, 347

Le Bon, Gustave, 11

Lee, Higginson and Company, 124

Lee, Ivy, 549, 568

Lee, Joseph, 831

Leech, Margaret, 577

Legal institutions and practices, criti-
cisms of, 372-377

Legal practice, commercialized, 417-426 ;
suggested reforms in, 442-449

Legion of Decency, 586

Leisure, appraisal of, 876 ; art-activity,
838-839 ; ethics of, 804-807 ; evolution
of, 797-804; recreation and, 812-815;
social and psychological phases of, 807-
812

Le Play, Fre"de*ric, 7

Lerner, Max, 415

Leuba, J. H., 712

Levenson, Eleanore, 401

Lewis, Dio, 825

Lewis, Joseph, 692

Lewis, Sinclair, 627, 628

Lewisohn, Ludwig, 629

Lewisohn. Sam A., 435

Libel racket, 580-581

Liberty, crisis in, 306-308

Liberty League, 418, 554

Lichtenberger, J. P., 653

Lilburne, John, 270

Lincoln, Abraham, 300

Lindeman, E. C., 188-189

Lippmnn, Walter, 155, 708, 803

List, Friedrich, 335

Little, Clarence C., 759-760

Livestock, use in agriculture, 70, 72, 74,

76-77

Lobby, national, power of, 246-247
Locke, John, 177, 178, 369, 685, 731
Lockhart, Robert, 824
Lockwood, Belva, 617
Locomotive, steain, invention of, 95
Loeb, Harold, 98
Lombard, Peter, 211
Loom, power, invention of, 94
Lorentz, Pare, 585
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 788
Lowell, Francis Cabot, 123
Lowenthal, Max, 128, 158
Lowie, Robert H., 44, 169, 603
Lucretius, 39
Lundberg, Ferdinand, 287, 355, 376, 377,

420, 422, 431, 432, 442
Lundberg, George A., 811
Lynd, Robert S., 46-47, 572, 776

M

MacDonald, Ramsay, 283, 285

MacDonald, William, 227

Machine politics, 236, 241-243

Machines, development of, 52-53, 94-97 ;
institutions and, gulf between, social
implications of, 55-58

Maclver, R. M., 15, 263

Mackay, John W., 480

MacLeish, Archibald, 563

Magic, distinguished from worship, 674

Magna Carta, 294

Maguire, John MacArthur, 446

Mahan, Alfred T., 317

Mail-order houses, development of, 102

Maine, Henry Sumner, 371

Maitland, F. W., 371

Malinowski, Bronislaw, 329, 603

Man, as an animal, 3 ; as a social being,
3-4

Manichaeism, contributions to Christian-
ity, 680-681

Mann, Horace, 732

Manorial system, 74-75, 90-92, 103

Manton, Martin T., 403-404

Manufacturing, control, forms of, 104-
109; evolution of, 85-112; first indus-
trial revolution, 94-95; Greek and
Roman, 88-90; industrial revolutions,
94-98; in ancient Near East, 87-88;
medieval, 90-92; modern, early, 92-93

Marconi, Guglielmo, 479

Marett, R. R., 672

922

INDEX

Marin, John, 849

Marriage, family and, 601-607

Marriage Counsel and Education, Bureau
of, 631

Marshall, John, 215

Martial Relations Institute, 612

Martin, Everett Dean, 11, 770

Marx, Karl, 3S, 771)

Mass production, 1)5-98

Mass purchasing power, inadequate, 143-
146

MauroiH, Andr<5, 342, 616

May, Mark A., 713

Mayo, Morrow, 82

McConnell, Francis J., 700

McCormick, Cyrus H., 81

McDougall, William, 164, 814

McEvoy, J. P., 510

McGuire, John MacArthur, 404

McReynolds, James C., 414

Menus, Gardner, 182, 199

Mechanization of agriculture, 81-84

Mechanized warfare, 318-321

Medical science, development of, 25

Medieval society, agriculture in, 74-78;
art in, 841-843; capitalism during,
118-121 ; censorship in, 574 ; civil
liberties in, 293-294 ; commerce and
trade, 100, 102; decline of, 49 50; de-
mocracy in, 269-270 ; education in,
729-731; feudal politics, 208-212; in-
dustry, 90-92 ; inheritance of property,
187; law in, 302-367; property in,
174-176 ; property rights, 162 ; recrea-
tion in, 816, 820; warfare, methods of,
314-316

Medill, Joseph, 488

Meiklejohn, Alexander, 771

Mellett, Lowell, 563, 591

Mencken, H. L., 578, 628-629, 723, 757,
760

Mental hygiene movement, 733-734

Mercantile system, 120-121

Merriam, Charles E., 763

Mesopotamia, see Near East

Metal working, early, 87-88

Methods of warfare, changing, 311-321

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company,
569

Metropolitan Motion Picture Council, 590

Michels, Robert, 240, 273

Middle Ages, see Medieval society

^Military system, development of, 323-326

Mill, James, 59

Miller, Clyde R., 545, 550, 552

Miller, Gerrit Smith, 823

Milton, John, 575

Mishkin, Charles, 444-445

Mismanagement through finance capital-
ism, 127-131

Mitchell, Margaret, 548

Mithraism, contributions to Christianity,
680

Modern society, capitalism in, 120-121 ;
divorce in, 621-629; law in, 368-370;

Property in, 176-178; property rights
i, 163; religion in, 702-712; warfare
in, 316-321

Moley, Raymond, 430-431, 432, 448
Monaghan, Robert, 429
Monkg, as medieval farmers, 77 ; book-
making by, 460 ; industry by, 91-92
Monogamy, 603-605

Montessori, Marie, 733

Moore, John Bassett, 408

Moral codes, genesis of, 718-720; ra-
tional, essentials of, 720-725

Morals, religion and crime, 712-714

More, Louis T., 718

Morell, Peter, 526

Morgan, J. P., 124, 126, 577

Morgan, Lewis Henry* 43-45

Morris, William, 111, 843

Morse, Samuel, opposition to, 54, 477

Moses, Robert, 848, 850

Motion pictures, censorship, 585—591 ; in-
dustry, rise of, 505-514

Motion Picture Producers and Distribu-
tors of America, 587

Motion Picture Research Council, 512-
513

Motorbuses, development of, 472-473

Mowrer, Ernest R., 624

Mumford, Lewis, 68

Mural painting, 847, 851

Murchison, Carl, 713

Murphy, Frank, 414

Museums, status of, 850-851

Music, interest in, 845-846, 847, 849-850,
851-852

Muslims, as medieval farmers, 77-78;
manufacturing by, 92

Mussolini, Benito, 349-350

Mutiny Act, 295

Mutual aid, value of social organization,
16-17

Mutual Broadcasting System, 520

Mutual interest, group influence of, 11,
12-13

Muzzey, David S., 17, 313, 533

N

Naismith, James, 824

National Association of Broadcasters,

523
National Association of Manufacturers,

568

National Board of Review, 586-587
National Broadcasting Company, 517
National City Bank of New York, 124
National Committee for Mental Hygiene,

645-646

National Council on Freedom from Cen-
sorship, 588
National Education Association, 741. 743,

786

National Electric Light Association, 569
National honor, concept of, 337—338
National Industrial Recovery Act, 149
National Labor Relations Act, 149-150
National law, rise of, 367-368
National parks, development of, as recrea-
tion centers, 828
National problems, how war complicates,

309-310
National Recreation Association, 829,

831-832, 834

National state, rise of, 212-214
National Youth Administration, 635, 640
Nationalism, history of, 200-221; in
United States, 214-217; prejudices of,
537-538; sovereign states and, 217-
219 ; war psychology and, 219-221
Natural law, doctrine of, 369, 370-371,
406-417

INDEX

923

Nazi Germany, see Germany

Near Bast, ancient, agriculture in, 70-
72 ; art in, 840 ; capitalism in, 115-116 ;
city-states, government of, 202-205;
civil liberties in, 292; commerce and
trade, 99, 101-102; divorce in, 619;
education in, 728; family in, 605-606;
inheritance of property, 186 ; manu-
facturing in, 87-88 ; property in, 171—
172 ; property rights in, 162 ; recreation
in, 817-818; warfare, methods of, 311

Needs, human, arising from basic drives,
23-24

Negroes, prejudice against, 542, 545

Neighborhood, breakdown of, 655-656

Neilson, James, 95

New Deal, 64, 85, 133, 143, 154, 413,
424, 555

New Oxford Movement 692-693

New School for Social Research, 779

Newspaper, daily, development of, 466,
487-503

Newsreels, informational pictures, 506

New York City Legal Aid Society, 446

New York Society for the Suppression of
Vice, 577-578

New York State Crime Commission, re-
port of, 435

Nickerson, Hoffman, 325, 333

Nicolai, G. M., 329

Niepce, Joseph, 506

Non-marriage, results of, 638-640

Novicow, Jacques, 40, 329

O

Odegard, Peter, 570

Ogburn, William F., 97, 523, 610

Ogden, C. K., 450

Old age, as industrial and social prob-
lem, 156-158

Oligarchical tendencies in party politics,
240-241

Olympic games, revival of, 824-825

Omens, belief in, 58-59

O'Neill, Eugene, 579

Onions, Peter, 95

Order, social organization need for, 17

Organization, social, basis of, 5-6 ; con-
tributions of, 16-18; costs of, 17-18;
forms of, 15—16 ; historical development
of, 5-6; meaning of, 3-5; value of,
16-18

Organization of teachers, 791-794

Organized labor, problems of, 149-153

Orient, see Near East, ancient

Osborn, Henry Fail-field, 330

Others-groups, development of, 14-15

Out-groups, development of, 14-15

Overstreet, Harry B., 264-266

Owen, Robert, 779

Oxford movement, 686

Pacifism, contemporary regard for, 301

Paetow, Louis J., 455

Paetus, Sextus Aelius, 361

Pageantry, growth of, 853

Paine. Thomas, 685

Painting, appreciation of, 845-847, 849

Paley, William S., 592

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 308

Pankhurst, Emmeline, 617

Paper, early use of, 454

Papyrus, early use of, 454

Parker, Francis, 733

Parker, Thomas C., 859

Parker, .Valeria H., 631

Parochial schools, 735

Parrish, Wayne W., 83-84

Parry, Albert, 816

Party government, corruption and extra-
vagance under, 248-259; problems of,
239-248 ; reform measures, fate of,
259-267 ; rise of, 232-239

Party leaders, 230

Party politics, costs of elections, 243-244

Patriarchal empires of antiquity, govern-
ment of, 205-208

Patriarchial family, break-up of, 608-613

Patrick, George T. W., 813

Patriotism, 331-332; nationalism, and
war psychology, 219-221 ; prejudices
of, 537

Peace, war influence on, 344

Peary, Robert E., 464

Peck, William G., 282

Peckstein, Louis, 745

Pecora, Ferdinand, 396

Pensions, expenditures for, 255-256

Peoples institute, 779

Pepper, George Wharton, 261

Periodical literature, 503-505

Perjury in courtroom, 396-398

Perkins, Frances, 616

Perpetuation, self, basic human drive, 22

Persian contributions to Christianity, 680

Personal liberty, 291

Personal property, distinguished, 161, 16.3

Petition of Rights, 294

Pfeil, Stephen, 160

Phoenicians, capitalism among, 116 ; see
also Near East, ancient

Photography, discovery of, 506

Pierce, Bessie L., 763

"Pinhead jurisprudence," 395-396

Pitkin, Walter B., 343, 156

Platt, Thomas C., 241

Playground Association of America, 831

Playgrounds, development of, 831-832

Plow culture, agriculture, 71, 73, 76

Political bond, promoting group life, 9

Political causes of war, 336-339

Political censorship, 581-585

Political opinions, current, 60

Political parties, role of, 229-232

Political prejudices, 538

Political problems, growing complexity
of, 217-219

Political propaganda, 554-564

Political society, development of, 6

Pollock, Channing, 157

Pollock, Frederick, 371

Polyandry, 604

Polygyny, 604

Pork barrel system, 254-256

Postal service, improvement of, 485-487

Postal Telegraph Company, 480

Post Office Department, censorship of,
576, 579

Potter, Charles Francis, 701

Potter's wheel, early use of, 88

Pound, Cuthbert, 434

Pound, Roscoe, 355, 370, 377

Power, development of, 96-97

924

INDEX

Powys, John Cowper, 705

Prejudice, remedies for, 504-595 ; role of,
in modern life, 533-545

Prelude to second World War, 345-348

Prentiss, Mark O., 395

Preservation, self, basic human drive, 22

Pressey, S. L., 813, 822

Price, Byron, 585

Primary groups, community organization
supplants, 664-666; disintegration of,
651-657 ; role of, in social life, 650-651

Primitive society, art in, 839-840; civil
liberties in, 292 ; commerce and trade,
101; divorce in, 619; education in,
728; family in, 601-604; inheritance
of property, 186; law in, 355-358;
leisure in, 798 ; manufacturing, 85-87 ;
moral codes in, 718 ; property in, 168-
171; property rights, 162; recreation
in, 816, 817; religion in, 671-674, 677-
678 ; tribal society, government of, 201-
202; warfare, methods of, 311

Prince of Wales, sinking of, 320

Printing, invention of, 460-463

Pritchett, Henry S., 762

Private property, future of, 198-199;
major inroads on, 197-198

Profit system, 111

Progressive education movement, 733, 815

Progressive party, 273

Propaganda, appraisal of crisis in, 873 ;
business, 564-569; democracy and,
572-573 ; devices and processes of, 550—
554 ; educational, 571-572 ; history and
nature of, 545-550; political, 554-564;
religious, 569-571 ; remedies for, 594-
597 ; war, effect of, 342-343 ; war, use
of radio, 524

Propeller, screw, invention of, 95

Property, abuses of, 195-197; after In-
dustrial Revolution, 178-180 ; appraisal
of crisis in, 866-868; cause of war,
196-197; concepts, 161-163; defini-
tions, 160-161 ; drives, in light of psy-
chology, ethnology, sociology, 165-168;
history of, 168-185 ; in early Greece,
172-174; in early modern times, 176-
178; inheritance of, 185-189; in me-
dieval society, 1747-176; in primitive
society, 168-171 ; in Roman society,
174 ; legal protection of, 406-417 ; pri-
vate, development of, 46; private, fu-
ture of, 198-199; private, major in-
roads on, 197-198; psychological foun-
dations of, 164-165 ; social justification
of, 189-195; under finance capitalism,
180-185 ; war effect on, 340
Proportional representation, 264-266

Protestantism, divorce under, 621; en-
couraged capitalism, 119-120; rise of,
683-685

Prothero, R. W., 78

Psychological bond, group influence of,
11 ; of human society, 8

Psychological causes of war, 330-333

Psychological foundations of property,

164-165
Psychology, property drives in light of,

Public education, 732, 734-746
Public forum movement, 746
Puddling process, invention of, 95
Pulitzer, Joseph, 489

Pupin, M. I., 695

Purchasing power, mass, inadequate, 143-
146

Q

Quigley, Martin, 585-586
R

Race, prejudices of, 536, 541-542

Racial kinship, as social bond, 8

Radicalism, contemporary reception of,
299-301

Radio, censorship, 591-594 ; development
of, 514-530 ; industry, growth of, 516-
517

Radio Corporation of America, 517

Radio newspaper, 527

Railroads, development of, 467-471

Randall, John Herman, 694-695, 696, 708

Rank and grades, prejudices of, 536

Rationalism, rise of, 685-687

Ratzenhofer, Gustav, 333

Rautenstrauch, Walter, 134, 158

Raymond, Henry, 488

Real property, distinguished, 161, 163

Reaper, invention of, 81-82

Recreation, appraisal of, 876; cost of,
annual, 835 ; development of, 28 ; facil-
ities for, 828-829 ; history of, 815-827 ;
in United States, 827-838; leisure and,
812-815

Reed, Stanley, 414

Reforms, fate of, party politics, 259-267 ;
suggested, in legal practice and court-
room procedure, 442-449

Refugees, 323

Religion, appraisal of crisis in, 875; as
primary institution, 33 ; basis of social
organization, 5; Christian synthesis,
the, 678—683 ; concepts and practices,
fundamental, 677-678; conduct and
ethics, attitudes toward, 714-718; con-
flict of science with, 693-699; control
of medieval church, 210-211 ; cultural
lag of, 62 ; development of, 6, 669-686 ;
evolution of, 47 ; factor promoting

froup life, 9; group influence of, 12:
umanizing of, 699-702 ; morals, crime,
and, 712-714 ; nature and social im-
portance of, 669-670 ; potency of, 670 ;
prejudices of, 535, 541 ; primitive so-
ciety, development in, 671-674, 677-
678; propaganda in, 569-571; protes-
tantism and rationalism, 683—687 ; rise
of gods, 674-677; role of, in modern
life, 702-712 ; twentieth-century groups,
687-693

Renard, George, 70

Republican party, 238

Republics, ascendancy of the, 221-228

Repulse, sinking of, 320

Revenues and expenditures, federal, proc-
ess of determining, 253

Revolutions, agricultural, 78-81 ; com-
mercial, 80; industrial, 52-53, 81, 94-
98; social, behind second World War,
348-352; world, 36-37, 48-50

Rice, Stuart A., 472, 512, 526

Riegel, O. W., 532, 583-584

Riley, William B., 688

Ripley, W. Z., 129-130

INDEX

925

Ripuarian law, 362

Rivers, W. H. B., 164

Roads, development of, 95, 465-466, 473-
474

Robinson, Edward S., 355, 813

Robinson, James Harvey, 219, 269, 597,
095-696, 720, 749, 759, 774

Robinson, Joseph T., 414

Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 848

Rockefeller, John D., Sr., 124

Rodell, Fred. 376-377, 378-381, 390, 391,
408, 41&-419, 431, 443, 541

Roebuck, John, 95

Rogers, Lindsay, 349

Roman Catholic Church, canon law of,
361, 365-367; control over medieval
culture, 210-211 ; divorce, attitude
toward, 620-621; education, 735; in-
fluence in Middle Ages, 683

Roman society, agriculture in, 73-74 ; art
in, 841; capitalism in, 116-118; cen-
sorship in, 573 ; civil liberties in, 292-
293 ; commerce and trade, 99, 102 ;
contributions to Christianity, 681-682 ;
decline of, 49; democracy in, 269; di-
vorce in, 619-620; education in, 729;
family in. 60(5-607; inheritance of
property, 187 ; law in, 358-362 ; manu-
facturing, 89-90; patriarchal govern-
ment of, 207-208; property in, 174;
property rights in, 162; recreation in,
817, 819 ; warfare, methods of, 312-313

Romanticism, school of, 685-686

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 351-352

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 50, 282, 300, 414,
555

Roosevelt, Theodore, 348, 802

Root, Elihu, 241, 405

Ross, E. A., 19, 649

Rotation of crops, 78-79

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 270

Rubber industry, development of, 95-96

Rural life patterns, effect of city life on,
662-664

Rural play group, decay of, 656-657

Ruskin, John, 111, 843

Russell, Bertrand, 624, 625

Russell Sage Foundation, 154

Russia, after first World War, 349 ; civil
liberties in, 295-296; constitution,
226; control of farming, 104; control
of industry, 109; control of trade, 110;
feminism in, 617; inheritance of prop-
erty, 188 ; planned economy, 98 ; prop-
erty rights in, 185; suffrage in, 272

Ryan, John A., 157, 699

Saarinen, Eliel, 848, 851

Sacred, fundamental religious concept,

677
Sacrifice, fundamental religious concept,

677

St. John, Charles W., 437
Sait, E. M., 266
Salaries, excessive, mismanagement

through, 131
Salic law, 362
Sanger, Margaret, 617
Sapir, Edward, 451
Sargent, Dudley A., 825
Sargent, Porter, 753-754

Sarnoff, David, 517

Say, J. B., 59

Schaffle, Albert, 19

Schlesinger, A. M., 214

Schnitzler, Arthur, 577

Schoeffer, Peter, 462

School buildings, 735-738

Shuler, Robert P.. 594

Schuman, Frederick, 274, 561

Schwimmer, Rosika, 301, 413

Science, conflict of religion with, 693-
699 ; development of, 29 ; stimulated by
war, 339

Scopes trial, 688

Scott, Jonathan French, 332, 571, 763

Scripp, E. W., 489

Sculpture, modern, 849

Seagle, William, 385, 441, 580

Secularism, influence on family life, 609-
610

Seldes, George, 346, 501, 584

Seldes, Gilbert, 529

Self-esteem, prejudice of, 536

Self-expression, basic human drive, 22

Self-preservation, basic human drive, 22

Sellars, Roy W., 707

Senior, Nassau, 196

Sentences, percentage of each kind, given
by judges, 437

Sex, abnormal, 639 ; as socializing influ-
ence, 7 ; basis of social organization, 5 ;
Christian influence on, 607-608 ; double
standard, 617 ; human characteristics,
601-602; monogamy, practice of, 603-
604 ; mores, embodiment of present, 60-
61 ; polyandry and polygyny, practice
of, 604; Protestant influence on, 607-
608; secularism, influence on, 609-610;
unmarried adult, 638-640

Shand, Alexander, 814

Shapley, Harlow, 693

Shaw, Clifford, 647

Shearer, W. B., 346

Shinn, Henry A., 374

Shipbuilding, 93

Sills, Milton, 511-512

Skidmore, Thomas, 779

Skiing, popularity of, 830-831

Slater, Samuel, 123

Slavery, exploitation by, 195

glesinger, Donald, 789-790

Slichter, Sumner H., 151

Small, A. W., 333

Smeaton, John, 95

Smith, Adam, 17, 59, 107. 177, 717

Smith, Alfred E., 448, 554

Smith, Charles B., 692

Smith, G. Elliot, 69, 450

Smith, Hart, 801-802

Smith, Preserved, 461-462, 463

Smith, Reginald Heber, 405

Smith, Young B., 394

Snyder, Carl, 137, 190

"Social Darwinism," 328-329

Social implications of gulf between ma-
chines and institutions, 55-58

Socialist party, 273

Social liberty, 291

Social organism, society and the, 19-21

Social organization, see Organization,

social

Social revolution, behind second World
War, 348-352

926

INDEX

Social Security Act, 641

Society, form of social organization, 15 ;

impact of war upon, 339-344; social

organism and, 19-21
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Children, 647

Sociological causes of war, 333
Sociological school of jurisprudence, 372
Sociology, property drives in light of,

165-168

Socio-religious organizations, 711-712
Sokolsky, George, 5G5
Somerville, Lord, 79
Spanish Civil War, 347
Spartan society, see Greek society
Speculation, as inroad on private prop-
erty, 198

Spencer, Herbert, 8, 19, 20, 38, 39. 813
Spinning machines, invention of, 94
Sports, historical survey of, 818-825
Stability, social organization needed for,

17

Stakhariov, Alexey, 109
Standard Oil Company, 124
Stan ton, Elizabeth Cady, 017
State activity, nationalism and, 217-219
State Board of Censorship, New York,

586, 587

State capitalism, 123, 127
Steamboat, development of, 95
Stein, Ludwig, 15
Steiner, Frank, 713
Steiner, Jesse F., 827, 837-838
Steinheil, Karl A., 477
Stephenson, George, 95
Stern, Bernhard J., 53
Steuer, Max, 419
Stevens, Thaddeus, 548
Stock-breeding, development of, 79
Stockton, Robert, 333
Stopes, Marie, 617
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 548
Strachey, John, 301
Strunskv, Simeon, 155, 803
Studeba'ker, John W., 560-561, 746, 780
Sturm, Johannes, 731
Suffrage, woman, 616
Sumner, John S., 577, 578, 579, 580
Sumner, William Graham, 31, 330
Superstitious beliefs, 58-59
Supreme Court, Federal, 408-416
Surpluses, agricultural, 84
'Sutherland, E. II., 422
Swaine, Robert T., 418
Swancara, Frank, 389
Swing, Raymond Gram, 523

Tabloid newspapers, 489

Taboo, fundamental religious practice,

677

Taft, William Howard, 404, 562
Talbot, W. H. Fox, 506
Tank warfare, 318-321
Tarde, Gabriel, 97, 813
Taussig, F. W., 191
Taxation, an inroad on private property,

197

Taylor, Frederick W., 108
Teachers, academic freedom of, 787- (91;

bill of rights for, 790-791 ; dismissal of.,

788-790; organization of, 791-794; re-
strictions on, 783-787

Teachers Union, 786

Techniques of warfare, changing, 311-
321

Technocracy, industrial control «by, 109,
285, 289

Technology, evolution of, 46, 62; modern
machine, 97-98 %

Telegraph, development of, 476-480

Telephone, development of, 467, 480-485

Telephoto, introduction of, 491-492

Teletypesetting machine, invention, of,
491

Television, development of, 527-530

Tennis, popularity of, 828

Textbooks, prejudice of, 332-333

Textiles, early, 88; early modern period,
92-93, 94-95

Thayer, Webster, 396

Theater, censorship of, 577-580; modern,
852-853

Theodosius II, code of, 361

Third Degree, in criminal law, 433-434

Thomas, Norman, 273

Thomusius, Christian, 732

Thompson, W. S., 258, 327

Thompson, William G., 432

Thorndike, Edward L., 779

Thrasher, Frederic M., 647

Threshing machine, invention of, 82

Tindal, Matthew, 575, 685

Toleration Act, 295

Tonnies, Ferdinand, 15

Tools, primitive, 85-86

Totalitarianism, established in Europe,
349-351

Total warfare, 320-321, 326

Townshend, Lord, 78-79

Tozzer, A. M., 58

Trade, control of, 109-111; development
of, 26, 98-102

Traditions, common, promotes group life,
9

Trailers, development of, 472

Transitional character of era, 48-52

Transportation, appraisal of crisis in, 871-
872; beginnings of, 465-467; develop-
ment of, 25, 26, 96; early, 88; improve-
ments in, 467-476

Travel, as antagonist of prejudice, 544 ;
recreation and, 829-830

Trawney, R. H., 178

Trial by jury, travesty of, 437-442

Tribal society, government of, 201-202

Troeltsch, Ernst, 177

Trotter, Wilfred, 202

Trusts, industrial, development of, 124-
125

Tull, Jethro, 78

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 11, 215

Tuttle, Charles H., 397

Twelve Tables, Laws of the, 359-360

Two-party system, 231

Tylor, E. B., 672

Type, printer's, early, 402

Typesetting machines, invention of, 461

U

Unemployment, industrial, problem of,

153-156
United Press agency, 493-494

INDEX

927

United States Office of Education, 735
United States Steel Corporation, 124, 137
Universal suffrage, 271.-272, GIG
Universities, development of, 730, 738-

739

Unmarried adult, problems of, 638-640
Untormeyer, Louis, 419
Urban life, impact of, on social institu-
tions, 657-6G2

Vaerting, Mathilde and Mathis, G03

Vail, Theodore N., 483

Van Devanter, Willis, 414

"Vanishing voter," 281

Voblcn, Thorstein, 160, 192-193, 801, 844

Vinogradpff, Paul, 371

von Liebig, Justus, 80

von Lilienfeld, Paul, 19

von Savigny, Friedrich, 371

W

Wages and Hours Act, 616, 646

Wagner Act, 150

Walker, "Jimmy," 258

Walker, Ralph, 848

Wallace, Henry, 304, 551

Wallace, W. K., 285

Wallas, Graham, 2(52, 277, 717

Waller, Willard, 637, 788

Walpole, Robert, 233

War, appraisal of crisis in, 869; as social
institution, 33, 321-323; causes of, in
contemporary society, 326-339 ; chang-
ing methods and techniques of, 311-
321 ; complicates national problems,
309-310; evolution of, 311-32G ; family
life and, 637 ; impact of, on society and
culture, 339-344

Ward; Lester F., 38, 773, 776

War psychology, nationalism, patriotism
and, 219-221

Washington, George, party politics and,

Waste in industry, 138-139

Watch and Ward Society, 578

Water sports, popularity of, 830

Water transportation, beginnings of, 466

Watson, Thomas A., 480

Watt, James, 94

Waugh, W. T., 463

Weber, Max, 177, 804

Weed, Thurlow, 488

We-groups, development of, 14—15

Weir, E. T., 149

Wells, H. G., 52, 596

Wcrgeld, table of, 362-363

Westermarck, Edward, 602-603

Western Union Telegraph Company, 479

Wheatstone, Charles, 477

Wheeler, Burton K., 414

Whelpton, P. K., 156

Whig party, 237

Whipple. Leon, 291

White, Andrew D., 693

White. Leslie A., 44

Whitehead, A. N., 696

Whitlock, Brand, 388-389

Whitney, Eli, 94, 108, 339

Widows, social problems of, 640-G41

Wigmore, John H., 402

Wile, Ira S., 639

Wilkinson, John. 95

Willcox, O. W., 61, 83

Willey, Malcolm M., 472, 512, 526

Willkie, Wendell, 199

Wilson, Wroodrow, 349

Winthrop, Alden, 129, 181

Wireless telegraph, development of, 479

Wirt, William, nominated by Anti-Ma-
sonic party, 236

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 617

Women, deserted, problems of, 641-643 ;
education of, 732; employed, G13-(J1S;
suffrage for, 538-539, GIG

Wood, Leonard, 245

Wood, Thomas, 524-525

Woodhull, Victoria, 617

Woolsey, John Munro, 299

Woolston, Thomas, 685

World fairs, 853

AVorld Peace Foundation, 563

World Peaceways, 563

World's Christian Fundamentals Asso-
ciation, 688

World War, first, 317-318, 349; second,
318-321, 345-348, 352

Worman, E. C., 827, 832

Worms, Rene, 20

Wormser, I. Maurice, 397, 427

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 848, 851

Wright, Quincy, 338

Wright brothers, 474

Writing materials, 454, 460

Written language, origins of, 453-454

Y

Young, Arthur, 79-80
Young, Charles V. P., 819
Young, Eugene J., 582-583
Young, Kimbal, 13
Young, Owen D., 517, 591

Z

Zaharoff, Basil, 346
Zangwill, Israel, 200
Zilboorg, Gregory, 321
Zukor, Adolph, 506